The landed gentry are only in charge until the king comes to town and chops off a few heads. At least that seems to be the case at Reddit, where CEO Steve Huffman pretended his complaints about cur…

The landed gentry are only in charge until the king comes to town and chops off a few heads. At least that seems to be the case at Reddit, where CEO Steve Huffman pretended his complaints about current moderators — who were protesting his decision to effectively cut off API access to tons of useful…

  • mo_ztt ✅@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    I literally made a reddit account a few days before the hullabaloo started, specifically to buy advertising on reddit.

    1. The ad interface is terrible. Most of my experience is with Google Ads, but in general, platforms try to be super-nice to their advertisers and give them a good experience. Not reddit. The same overall shittiness the infests the rest of the site is also in their ad portal.
    2. Most of the clicks were fairly poor quality (high bounce rate).
    3. Whatever I tried to configure to limit geographic reach to US+Canada either wasn’t set up right or was just ignored. I got plenty of clicks from all over world.

    I stopped advertising on blackout day for moral reasons regardless, but it also seemed like it just overall wasn’t worth it in general. And, my observation of the ads I see as a user has been that they aren’t at all tuned to what I would be likely to want, or constructed so I’d be likely to click on them. Some platforms I have to consciously avoid clicking on ads or scroll past them deliberately when my natural tendency is to click on them. On reddit it’s just weird nonsense that I want to scroll past anyway.

    In short, my brief experience with reddit ads made me conclude that it’s probably a waste of money anyway.

    • ryven@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      I would assume that almost all clicks are from people on the mobile app accidentally tapping ads while they try to scroll past them, because they’re in the main feed. So click quality being garbage doesn’t surprise me.