Reddit's new paid ads look exactly like user posts

ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 1343 points –
Reddit's new paid ads look exactly like user posts
zdnet.com

Calling them "free-form ads," Reddit said the new advertisements are its most native format ever, designed to look and feel like community content shared by real people.

The ads, meant to mimic the site's megathreads, will enable advertisers to utilize a variety of formats in one post, including images, videos, and text.

According to numbers from Reddit, free-form ads got 28% more clicks than all other types of ads on the site and saw a jump in community engagement.

The next time you see an interesting post in your Reddit feed, take a closer look - because it might just be a paid advertisement.

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So they seriously not remember what thousands of people left Digg and moved to their platform for???

Reddit had a fraction of the users Digg had at one point. Then Digg changed to a new UI no one liked and started putting adds that looked like posts into the main feed.

I literally would look for reddit posts about suggestions for various things specifically because they weren't ads.

Thanks spez for fucking killing one of the few resources I had that wasn't just paid bullshit lying about what products are worth a shit...

Let's be honest here. Reddit had been astroturfed for over a decade, and a majority of posts that spoke favourably of products were ads.

The only value Reddit had in that regard is through Google surfacing the valuable discussions and content (e.g. the ones that weren't the ads).

Reddit from the beginning had bot accounts to artificially inflate its number of users.

That was before learned helplessness became a staple of the internet experience, i think a lot fewer reddit users will be motivated to leave compared to the people who left digg for reddit.

Happy to be proven wrong, though.