The next attention-grabbing post you see in your Reddit feed might just be a paid 'free-form ad'.
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.
Paid ads should not only need to be marked, but noticeably different in a timeline. Something obvious like a different post color.
Twitter fits ads in the middle of content and just puts a little tiny "Ad" in the upper corner (on mobile at least) and at a glance scrolling through you can't tell it's an ad, other than all of their ads now being for some shady mobile game that lies about how it looks or crypto in various forms. Those should be required to have a different color background than actual user posts, not just a size 8 font "Ad" in the corner of the post on a 3.5" screen.
In fact, let's make it impossible to implement well, let's take a page out of the NHTSA handbook and require the "Ad" text to be a specific real world size like they do with the car warning lights. Make them figure out what size it needs to be for various screen sizes and display DPI if they want to shove ads in the middle of content like it was user posts.
I think what YouTube does would be sufficient. There's a noticeably different video progress bar colour (yellow instead of red) and a large "Skip Ad in __" in the corner, plus the advertiser information on the side.
Reddit could do this by putting a "Paid advertisement" watermark in the corner or putting "Advert" where the upvote/downvote buttons are and colouring it some noticeable colour, like yellow, and I would be satisfied with that.
Pretty sure this is not legal in many countries. Adverts must be at the very least labeled as such, like Google does with a tiny almost unnoticeable label.
In another article they post a photo of an example from reddit and it does say promoted next to the post title. So there's something there because there is an FTC law saying ads must be disclosed. Obviously they want to obfuscate that it's an ad as much as possible though so who knows how that'll change.
Annoying and all that, but something pretty common in most social media sites I see nowadays. I quickly learn to filter anything with that label out as junk.
"How do you do, fellow redditors? Pray tell, of all the Dodge Ram variants, which one is your favorite, and what make it your choice as a discerning American patriot?"
If was that post jail bait but pre incel ban wave if I recall correctly. They said it was targeted harassment/brigandine bc all the posts specifically named the accounts pushing each campaign.
I was curious about the "Philly cream cheese" campaign example they mentioned. I assume it's this post.
The top reply is trolling them, which is awesome. So much for increased engagement.
But even funnier is the next top reply, which seems sincere. But when you look at the user profile, almost all of u/sunshinedogger's comments in the last year are on sponsored posts. So even the positive engagement is manufactured?
Dang good catch on the second user, I wouldn't have noticed since I usually don't look at people's profiles.
It's kind of funny that reddit will become this chamber of advertisers making posts and fake users "engaging" while the real people all migrate to lemmy.
Absolutely, you cannot trust reddit content anymore. If anybody wants to still visit the site, I recommend you buy and AdBlock Gold subscription, which you can get at half the price now. Link and discount code in my profile
Weren't they also caught using AI bots to drive up engagement in some subreddits, too? (I think it was supposed to be some of their subreddits in foreign languages or something.)
Man, reading this post nearly gave me a headache. I hate it when brands try to act all 'hip and cool'.
Help us fill this thread with ways you use PHILLY Cream Cheese that shouldn’t be delicious✨ but are ✨
Yes, something about cream cheese freshly squeezed straight from the brick really does hit different.
Why let a little packaging get between you and your PHILLY, am I right?
Shut up brand. Shut the fuck up brand. Jesus Christ
"Just like the megathread," an announcement reads, "free-form ads encourage multiple users to come together, get the information they need, and deep dive into the topic at hand."
Reddit explained that the open-ended nature of these ads will give advertisers more freedom to explore creativity and, hopefully, to start conversations with users.
Years ago you used to be able to comment in ad threads. And most people were just calling the ad out on its bullshit. So they stopped allowing comment replies in those threads.
Yeah, I remember those fun times. See an ad post, look up their scandals on Wikipedia, post about those scandals in the comments...
There's no way this will work unless they lock down those posts. If they want something that looks like organic engagement with comments that don't ruin the brand, it can't work anything like the rest of Reddit. They'll have to have corporate moderators who remove any post that is even slightly challenging to the brand, because otherwise those will be the ones getting upvotes.
I'll tell you what's new, pal. The McRib Megaburger, at McDonalds. It's nutritious and delicious at just $7.99 or $9.99 with fries and a drink of your choice as long as you don't want a milkshake or anything with actual sugar in it.
Instead, you should hop on over to your local Chevy Dealership and ask about test driving the all new 2025 Tahoe. Drive one home today for less than $2,000 down!
Yep, advertiser don't care how they got those clicks. They just want the numbers to go up so they feel like their "investment" is doing something. Tricking people into thinking it's user content, showing half naked girls for a dumb mobile gambling game, showing fake products... they don't care. Advertisers only have one thought: "Hurr Durr Numbers Go Brr"
If it's one thing I learned from the last BS they pulled during the protests last year, it's that their actions will have little impact on reddit user behavior. People will complain and express outrage, but the vast majority of users will just sit back and take it like good little AI trainers.
I for one will not be one of them. When they removed mods from communities that were in protest, that's enough for me to stay clear going forward. As much as I miss the content, it warms my soul every time I think about the ad revenue they're missing out on by my own personal decisions to not consume it.
Lemmy has less content, but is also less addictive and less toxic. Yes it’s still social media, it still has shit bags but the numbers are far better.
Although part of that could also just be due to the size of the place. Lemmy's still absolutely tiny compared to Reddit, and like a lot of social media's early days, it'll likely only get worse as more people move in.
Early Reddit would have been pretty cosy and non-toxic, that would only come in later.
Entirely agreed, though I wish there were more of a joint effort between Lemmy and Kbin communities to find novel ways of getting more redditors to switch over to the Fediverse. Wishful thinking perhaps, though it'd be nice to have more active communities around here.
I never went back to /r/programming after they forced it open with new mods.
I checked reddit every now and then after that, until I read a piece of tragic news that really shocked me and left me sad for days. Then I realized that reddit just stopped being a fun place - the whole point I started visiting it in the first place. Never went back, never looked back.
Early results suggest the effort is working. 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.
Yeah, because users get tricked into clicking and then immediately leave.
One of the smarter ad analysts I knew likened ad spaces to ecosystems, where a bunch of companies come in with crap ads that aren't related to what people are actually in market for or are misleading, and act as polluters which turn people off from green pastures.
As an example, when mobile browsing was first getting off the ground CTR for mobile banner ads was 15%.
Ok if your ad uses TL;DR or any other internet speak, you deserve to go bankrupt. I'm so fucking sick of corporations trying to cash in on meme culture and trends and ruining it every single time.
The best thing about those ads is that they’re mostly “AI” generated. You know none of the people making those ads would actually wash the feet of a queer person.
Those types of ads have been there since near the start. Its been confusing people for years. All that will happen is the popular non-ad posts will get accused of being paid for.
Yeah I remember a few years ago when there was suddenly some sort of hype around Nutella and Nutella-based memes. Which just so happened to coincide with a major Nutella advertising campaign on other platforms.
People were eating it up and generating content, essentially doing an advertiser’s work for free 🤷♀️
I remember it already being a thing 5 years ago with upvote/downvote buttons, karma and everything. I guess they just removed the abyssmally small grey text that said something like 'paid ad' in a corner?
I used to post nasty things when they allowed that. Then I used to downvote them. Then the ad blocker I used blocked them so I never saw them. Then I stopped posting on Reddit.
This was a thing like 10 years ago too, iirc. Ads had threads and you could post in them and up/down vote them. That... didn't go well. For advertisers, that is.
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.
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.
Yep. Reddit puts very little effort into preventing vote manipulation and astroturfing because it all looks like user engagement but they almost certainly know how common it is.
This is just them monetizing the astroturfing as they try and wring every cent from people ahead of their IPO.
You're just splurging lies at this point, reddit has always put plenty of effort towards vote manipulation. I dislike reddit but stop making stuff up just for votes.
That's most of the internet now. I mean, yay, we're calling bad stuff bad. I do it, too, and I'm also addicted to orange man news like all you other rubber-neckers, but yawn it's all getting a bit repetitious and homogenized. Unfortunately, as we get bored, the more these nutty politicians do crazy shit for the media to report on, all to keep our attention. It feels like a death spiral.
I took ads out on Reddit years ago just to see if I could promote my music. It did less than zero and actively dragged me into a load of shit on various subs of interests I had. People there refused to talk to me, and told others not to.
Reddit is toxic. I avoid the site. Or better still maybe people should just spam it with irelevant shit
Reddit's advertising platform has been garbage the entire time, I remember randomly going down the rabbit hole on social media marketing articles and the unanimous consensus among them was how bad/useless traditional advertising on Reddit was. One of the many reasons was due to how aggressively advertisement averse the userbase was (there were plenty of other critiques, such as how awful the management dashboard, metrics insight, etc. were). That being said, they did point out how fairly successful "organic" advertising could be on the site, e.g. AMAs, ads disguised as seemingly innocent meme posts, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I loathe advertisements, too. I think reddit is/has been going the wrong direction in focusing so much on ads as their primary method of generating revenue. However, there is no excuse for harassing an independent artist just trying to get their work out there to get discovered. Sorry you went thru that mate.
I took the ads out because even though it isnt a career (music is a serious hobby, you might say) there was push back against putting your own music on the platform. "No self promotion" was a general rule iirc. A few subs kind of let it happen but they were rare.
The dashboard was indeed shit. It had all the wrong details and choices for someone like me.
I would have done an AMA but I'm just a bloke, LOL! And yes I agree - the users are anti-ad. Not sure how a site like that floats, financially. Can only imagine there is corp or Government money secretly going in (as we found out years after Google started up).
For anyone who is curious, Coca-Cola! Real cocaine in the lower 13 states and real cane sugar! Nothing blasts thirst like the delicious taste of a coca-cola fizzy drink!
In a few years my computer will be able to run an acceptable but obviously not chatGPT4 level AI that will among other things pre filter this crap from my feed as part of normal ad blocking. Buckle up bitches.
AI filtering of Reddit isn't the way. The way is leaving the platform. This is beginning to remind me of the 'decrapify Windows' YT videos that offer 20-step multi-application guides for getting a tolerable experience, instead of explaining how to install Mac/Linux. Time spent on a rotten foundation is wasted.
I think a lot of the Internet is going to end up shitted up with this kind of nonsense. While leaving Reddit certainly tackles one issue, having a way to filter out the rest of this shit would be useful.
Fortunately, at least in my experience, the adblockers usually win. Even if a company changes something to avoid an adblocker or force someone to turn off their adblocker (Hi, Twitch!), it's usually fixed within just a few hours at most.
The reddit mobile browser is literally broken and keeps getting worse. They are updating it a lot, but I swear to god it gets worse and increasingly broken with each iteration. I actually liked the browser when they initially killed 3rd party apps, but shortly after that it got a huge redesign that was infinitely worse than before. I am thoroughly convinced they want that experience to be miserable so I go download and use their ad-infested shitty app instead. Fuck reddit.
I am confident that's the case - there's a reason the mobile website is constantly asking you if you'd like to use the app instead... it's their preferred mode for you to view. Even if it is terrible, it locks you onto Reddit.
They can access a lot more information about you with a native app, and it also gives them the ability to do push notifications which makes things more sticky
Reddit will program new mod bots to deal with organic responses the advertiser doesn't consider constructive. That opens another revenue stream: charging advertisers for sub-specific bot tweaks.
The interesting question to me is, when does normie realize his sub has been co-opted to function as a focus group, and decide to look for a new forum.
They had tons of covert "ads" before this, too. Set up like 100 fake accounts (commonly bought from people who create and fluff them up by posting and commenting for a while so they look legit) and then post your add and use like 20 or so of your Bot accounts to upvote and comment to get the ball rolling.
Then you have your add there, got it climbing a bit in "new" and didn't pay a dime for it.
I remember when reddit ads were off to the side and unobtrusive, and often had games or jokes in that space to encourage you to allow reddit past your ad blocker.