1y ago

Here's How Reddit F**ks Advertisers

There's been a few people who commented this in the past, but as an advertiser on Reddit, I want to share the numbers I see.

First, there's a few things to understand in the world of advertising:

Cost Per Impression - Usually shown as a cost per 1000 impressions, this is how much it costs to run a regular ad
Cost Per Click - This is a different type of ad where you only pay for who clicks. It's also the reason sometimes you see really bad ads - They're only paying per click, so they want the most gullible customers
Analytics - I can watch who comes to my website and what they do. I can actually watch a lot more info than that, but it's all I need to run my businesses
Organic User - Someone who came to my website without an ad

PSA: If you're not using uBlock Origin to block ads, please install it. Firefox - Chrome. Every other mainstream adblocker sells your data in some capacity, but uBlock Origin is open source.

Now, with those things in mind, I pay for Cost Per Click, and I target a more expensive user group. In the ad I'm about to show you (picked at random, but it's within +-20% of most my ads), it costs me an average of $0.82 every time someone clicks my ad:

(Yes, it's brutally expensive. If you really hate ads, install AdNauseam. You will cost advertising companies thousands of dollars.)

But okay that's fine, because roughly 2,000 people went to my site, right? Lets see what they did when they went there

See - There's something interesting about this, and it's less apparent in other advertising networks. You see while Reddit charged me 1,600$ for 2,000 users, my own analytics show only 1,142 people came to my site in the same time window - and that number also includes my organic users, by the way.

So what happened to almost 50% of the users I paid for? Some people accuse Reddit of inflating the numbers, but that's illegal, and there's a much simpler explanation. Reddit's PMs and are deliberately designing ad placement to maximize clicks (and get more money). What they don't realize, is they've made everyone miss-click on ads, so both users and advertisers miss out.

In fact, that miss-clicking part is trivial to prove. Guess when I ran advertising campaigns on Reddit?

Anyways, that's all for now. Reddit doesn't only screw over their users, but their advertisers as well.

75 comments

PSA: If you’re not using uBlock Origin to block ads, please install it. Firefox - Chrome. Every other mainstream adblocker sells your data in some capacity, but uBlock Origin is open source.
It's not just about it being open source, it's about the mentality of the people running it. The lead dev for uBlock Origins is hard line on ad blocking and privacy. He fundamentally believes in what they created. That's the only person you want running something like that.
And they tell users to use Firefox, by the way, because uBlock on Chromium has been handicapped. If you want the full uBlock experience, Firefox is the one and only browser to use it on.
Edit: BTW if you ever want to cheer yourself up, take a look around the closed issues for uBlockOrigins on Git. Every now and again you come across some marketing company stooge stumbling in asking why some address is being blocked and asking for it to be whitelisted, only to get a hard no, then get flummoxed as if they don't understand why. It's beautiful.
- The uBlock team has fought a constant war with advertisers and Chrome on our behalves. Mozilla has done it's part as well. They deserve a lot of credit and respect for it. And support.
- It's not just about it being open source, it's about the mentality of the people running it.
  It's about both. Because, if it isn't open source, ~~there is no way~~it is substantially more difficult to verify that the people running it aren't lying.
  
  They said "It's not just about open source", implying that its about both open source and about the mentality, just like you said.
- I had a browse through the issues but I couldn’t find a good example - would love a link if someone finds one!
- What aspects are handicapped in chromium?
  
  https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/chromes-new-ad-blocker-limiting-extension-platform-will-launch-in-2023/
  Starting in June 2023 and Chrome 115, Google "may run experiments to turn off support for Manifest V2 extensions in all channels, including stable channel." Also starting in June, the Chrome Web Store will stop accepting Manifest V2 extensions, and they'll be hidden from view. In January 2024, Manifest V2 extensions will be removed from the store entirely.
  Google says Manifest V3 is "one of the most significant shifts in the extensions platform since it launched a decade ago." The company claims that the more limited platform is meant to bring "enhancements in security, privacy, and performance." Privacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) dispute this description and say that if Google really cared about the security of the extension store, it could just police the store more actively using actual humans instead of limiting the capabilities of all extensions.
  The big killer for ad block extensions comes from changes to the way network request modifications work. Google says that "rather than intercepting a request and modifying it procedurally, the extension asks Chrome to evaluate and modify requests on its behalf." Chrome's built-in solution forces ad blockers and privacy extensions to use the primitive solution of a raw list of blocked URLs rather than the dynamic filtering rules implemented by something like uBlock Origin. That list of URLs is limited to 30,000 entries, whereas a normal ad block extension can come with upward of 300,000 rules.
  
  https://support.ublock.org/hc/en-us/articles/11749958544275-Google-s-Manifest-V3-What-it-is-and-what-it-means-for-uBlock-Users-

That's stage 3 enshitification for you.
- Wow. What a fantastic read
  
  Be sure to read the other blog post linked in that blog, too:
  https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start
  It's a rant from a veteran social media/blog writer from some of the earliest days of the internet.
  It's a bit repetitive, occasionally overwrought, and very long, so feel free to skip some paragraphs, but if you've been around the net for a while, especially if you were here before Facebook, you'll recognize exactly what they're describing and know that anger.
  That feels like 25 years of shit I've never been able to find the words to say.
- Woah, what? There are stages??? Do tell!

So users are mis-clicking on an ad and immediately closing their browser so it registers as a “click” on Reddit but not google analytics?
- It's not registering as a click anywhere but Reddit, because half the users are clicking Back before their browser loads, and a quarter are clicking Back within a second of the page appearing.
  This happens in all advertising networks, but not to the rate of Reddit
  
  Yeah, back before I used uBlock, when I would missclick and see it's loading an alb.reddit.com url, I would immediately hit the back button before it has time to redirect me to the ad.
  
  As someone who uses Reddit on devices that don't always have ublock, this is exactly what happens.
  
  That should show under bounce rate though, right? I can't imagine a user being able to click 'back' before an http request gets sent to the analytics server

Agree 100%. I’m a media director in a mid-size agency and saw similar results in a test campaign we did. Bounce rate was 97.1% on traffic coming from Reddit. It’s so high I wouldn’t put it past them if it was just bot traffic.

(Yes, it’s brutally expensive. If you really hate ads, install AdNauseam. You will cost advertising companies thousands of dollars.)
Thank you for pointing this out.
- But then you give more money to Reddit.
  
  I can solve this by - wait for it - not going to reddit.
  
  Temporarily. Only until advertisers do what this guy has done and realize, "Oh hey, the ads aren't effective at all" and change their advertising tactics
  
  In the short term

I clicked at least a few ads a week average on Reddit. All entirely on accident, closed them immediately. So, your numbers make perfect sense to me. Funny to think reddit charged someone near a dollar for that millisecond before I closed it...

So, love this stuff. It's been my career for nearly 20 years
Check out the engagement rate/bounce rate on those. I bet it's 15% engagement, tops (meaning 85% bounced). Probably as low as 5%
That's typical for ads like this. You're right that you're losing half your traffic (though I would pick sessions, not users, to see it a bit clearer. GA4 makes it more difficult but you should be able to create it).
What happens is users scroll, users accidentally click, and immediately hit back because, oh shit, they didn't want to click. Ad registers a click, browser window is closed before your gtag registers. I bet their own pixel doesn't even fire, if you have it on the site
Then the ones who don't close it in time, that's what you're seeing in reporting. When your bosses or the marketing team ask what those users did, you can confidently say, without looking, "nothing" and you will be right 99% of the time.
Now, we could argue that display ads are NOT for direct responses. They are to supplement other campaigns so your brand is freshwe when you do something better like paid search or emails. But if they want to charge by the click, it's still useless traffic.
Does Reddit offer CPA (cost per action)? Doubt it, since the sub-0.05% conversion rate means they'll get almost nothing, and they know it.
Also, look into Looker studio for these reports (free with GA), since GA4 sucks so bad right now. Hit me up with a PM if you haven't used it but want some free pointers or lesson (I have a FT job, I'm not scrounging for freelance work)

Reddit’s PMs and are deliberately designing ad placement to maximize clicks (and get more money). What they don’t realize, is they’ve made everyone miss-click on ads, so both users and advertisers miss out.
What does this mean? Are ads being sent in Private Messages on Reddit?
- I think he means performance marketing https://www.shopify.com/blog/performance-marketing. The ad placement is more to the point. If you put up a pop up where it's hard to find the x or right next to the next button where it's hard not to click.
  
  This makes sense!
- I think he means product managers? The people in charge of design changes and ad placement.
- I assume they ment project managers
- Project Manager
  
  *Product Manager. They meet with customers, analyze the competitive landscape, set the feature development roadmap, and define requirements for engineering teams. The "I'm a people person!" guy in Office Space.
  
  Thank you.

This is not unique to Reddit, either.
I started diving into YouTube advertising a few months ago, just as a tool for promoting a video of mine that I felt should have gotten more attention than the sub-thousand views it was stuck with. For the record, I don't try to force advertising on people that don't want it, and I was glad to achieve my 2k subscriber count to qualify for AdSense, just so that I can turn ads OFF on my videos. I have a stable full-time job and I feel like it's better to make my videos ad-free then to get whatever small amount of money YouTube is going to pay me for my hobby. If you want to use uBlock Origin to block YouTube ads, including my own, that's fine by me.
Anyway, my experience with Google Ads has been enlightening. First off, just to get clicks of any good quality is already expensive. I tried to be as inclusive as I could, but I have been fighting Average View Duration all the time. I want people clicking on the video that really want to see the video, not people who are confused about why they are there, whether it's in the wrong language, wrong set of search keywords, not the right device type for long-form videos, etc. So, I end up filtering down countries to ones with at least some amount of English-speakers, and aggressively trimming down keywords to just ones that are specific enough for the video content. Even then, I wished the Average View Duration was as high as some of my more organically-grown videos.
What's worse, and this is the point that is relevant to the OP, is that I can't match up Google Ads' click rate with my channel's video analytics, even though they are the same parent company! I can sort views by country in Google Ads, and it does not show the same set on the Geography tab in YouTube's video analytics, despite a view meaning the same thing in both platforms. For a time, it was consistently 30-50% less on video analytics, which is frustrating, because it makes it hard to figure out which countries have good AVD for the video and I wasn't sure if Google was just ripping me off on advertising costs.
Funny, I check it today and the problem is much less pronounced. I honestly think that recent advertising study lit a fire under Google to get them to fix problems like these. I wasn't using TrueView ads, but this might have been a side effect of that.

This reinforces my belief that online advertising produces a lot of objective data ("how many times was my ad viewed? clicked?") but benefits from not being able to tie that to outcomes companies are actually interested in ("are the ads expanding business?").
A number of years ago I read an analysis on how some large social media site had changed the order of a few important buttons out of the blue. This was likely from A/B testing showing increased engagement, but it was probably just confused users clicking on it. I bet similar things happen all the time in ads, possibly inadvertently. If an A/B change shows increased ad clicks, it's unlikely not to be adopted, even if it's not intentional clicks.
- A lot of fast paced companies, big on "ownership" and data give promotions based on how well your feature performed. You need a measurable metric, so they usually go for something like clicks.
  They absolutely know it's making the product worse. But for a 100k/yr bonus, they don't care.

Why are you suggesting everyone to use ad blockers and tools that would fuck with advertisers, when you yourself are an advertiser?
- Because fuck em
  
  Lol, ok understandable
  
  Absolute chadness. Salute. o7
  
  I salute you, sir!

But honestly don't a LOT of companies intentionally place ads to maximize misclicks? I'm not saying that's ok and as a consumer just flipping annoying but it's definitely not specific to reddit.
On RIF it was easy to tell what was an ad and avoid it if I wanted. One of the many reasons I am not using the official app (and therefore the site) is because they make ads look just like normal posts. It does say promoted but you have to actually be looking for that or you won't notice it.

I think Reddit specific design app so that people misclick more often.

And how is this not fraud?
- Arguably it's gross incompetence, as in they have a serious lack of knowledge about ad engagement
  
  Reddit routinely feigns incompetence when the reality is just that they're bad people.
  They pretend their staff don't see the extremism on their platform, but every time there's a mass shooting they'll be handing over the shooters predictable post history.
  They pretend it's impossible to stop someone from making a new account after they're banned for sending graphic rape threats to TwoXC posters, but they dont make even a token effort.
  Behind the incompetence there's always a situation where it's more profitable to just be evil.
- It probably is, but the ones that they are targeting aren't losing enough to make pursuing it worthwhile.

Interesting, I didn't know the prices vary by user group.
Which groups are the most expensive?

Do you still advertise there? If so, why?

Bottom line: stop advertising and do us all a favor

Could you show this to them and just say that you want your money back?
- That almost never happens. The best way is to stop advertising and call out their team when they beg you to reconsider
  It's worth it to get their reports though. Some of my happiest moments at work is to see the complete dogshit reports agencies and ad companies put out.
  If you're ever feeling like a loser think you're bad at your job, suffer from imposter syndrome, one of Facebook's, reddit's, or any other big company's ad reports will brighten up your life with how bad it is

Interesting read, thanks 👍🏼

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