How would you improve advertising on Reddit?
Let me preface that I'm well aware that if given the choice between frequent, untargeted ads or fewer targeted ads, the average Tilderino's response would be "Neither."
However, given that social media at scale has yet to establish a sustainable business model that doesn't rely on advertising (people like free content, after all), it seems advertising has become a necessary evil (and has pervaded nearly all forms of media for the past century regardless).
With that in mind, I think coming up with creative solutions to deliver relevant advertising while preserving user privacy and avoiding destructive feedback loops (i.e. where the search for ad revenue compromises the user base and content generation) is an interesting thought exercise. This is one of social media's largest problems, imho, but it might be easier to analyze just Reddit as a platform due to its similarities (and notable differences) to Tildes.
A couple thoughts of my own:
- Whitelist "safe" subreddits - A massive problem for Reddit is identifying content that brands want to avoid association with (e.g. porn, violence, drugs). While new subreddits crop up every day, the large ones do not change so fast and could be classified as safe content spaces (e.g. /r/aww)
- User subreddit subscriptions - Rather than target ads based on the subreddit currently being viewed, why not use the subs people have voluntarily indicated they are interested in?
- Allow users to tag content - While people can report content to the mods today, there is no ability to tag content (like Tildes has) from a user level. Content that's inappropriate for advertising may not necessarily be a reportable offense. By allowing users to classify content, better models for determining "good" content vs. "bad" could be developed using ML.
- Use Mods to determine content appropriateness - User supplied data may introduce too much noise into any given dataset, and perhaps mods are a better subjective filter to rely on. Certain subreddits can have biased mods for sure, but without trying to overhaul content moderation entirely, could mod bans/flair be used to indicate suitable content for ads?
- Use computer vision to classify content - While this wouldn't work at scale, an up-and-coming post could have a nebulous title and difficult-to-decipher sarcastic comments. The post itself could be an image macro or annotated video that could be used to determine the subject matter much more effectively.
To be clear, the spirit of my initial prompt isn't "how can Reddit make more money?" per se, but how can it find a sustainable business model without destroying itself/impacting society at large. Facebook and Twitter seem to have optimized for "engagement" metrics which leads to prioritization of outrage porn and political divisiveness. Snapchat and Instagram seem to have succumb to being mostly an ad delivery engine with some overly-filtered content of "real life" influencers (read: marketers) strewn in between. None of these seem like a net-good for society.
What are all your thoughts? Perhaps Big Tech social media is irredeemable at this point, but I'm trying not to take such a defeatist attitude and instead explore any positive solutions.
I, for one, am of the opinion that advertising must be severly curtailed, and not only on the internet.
Of course, a lot of economic sectors would need to completely re-engineer their economic model, and specially the media.
Of course, the idea of paying for information, and for entertainment, is totally foreign to the younger generations, and is forgotten by the rest. We do pay for it though : advertising absorbs 2.5 % or our GDP, which is enormous and also a sort of hidden taxation without representation.
Of course, the merchants would still need ways to publicise their wares : they would do so through dedicated and indentified channels.
Then, the media could do their job, which is to convey information to the citizens, and focus on the signal, being relieved of that noise of attention grabing and all the ill effects of targeted advertising.
The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that we must kill advertising before it kills civilisation. I don't believe it will be easy, though.
(Yes, I do donate to Tildes, to Wikipedia and to other ad-free media.)
Why is the default position that a for-profit business should be the sort of organization to establish a site or a space like Reddit? We can have absolutely free social media and little to no ads if we coalesced around non-profit alternatives. In Reddit's case, the genie is out of the bottle, but it seems like social media (which Reddit either is or is trying desperately to become) is something that businesses are ill-equipped to utilize to turn a profit without considerable social harms.
On the other hand, I haven't really looked for or found non-profit alternatives to social media, so I'm not really doing anything to solve it either. Since we are discussing the "younger generation" as we're called, the non-profit "alternatives" to social media really aren't social media; they are really geared towards the HN/Slashdot crowd, not the Instagram/Twitter/TikTok users. Neither kids nor grandma is gonna get in on Mastodon folks.
Two words that kill : infrastructure, payroll.
Internet is made of thousand and million kilometers of fiber-optic, and of $billions of servers and other networking equipment. The investments are huge. Since 1980, the economic doxa is that huge investments are realized by for-profit corporations. The first part is immutable, the second shall change.
Computer scientists, engineers and technicians are in the nasty habit of expecting to be paid for their work. A few do volonteer, but only a few.
A trusted old one is called society, as it was until 1995, and which was not completely satisfying either, but not that bad, considering.
Maybe you'd like to have a look at what Framasoft is doing. Or how Wikimedia thrieves without ads. Or the limited but significant presence of government broadcasters such as NPR, the BBC of Radio France.
Of course, the expression social media has come to designate a rather narrow band of Facebook-like outfits. Maybe it's time to pause and think about what exactly social means, and what is a medium exactly.
Bottom line : for 25 years we've been colonizing the World Wide Web, à la Old West. Time has come to civilize it.
How are those non-profit alternatives financed? Non-profit still has costs and bills and people still need to be paid.
Donations are not a reliable enough model for the kind of stability this sort of organization needs.
I mean, somehow Wikipedia manages to make ends meet. The site we're having this discussion on is able to exist as well without ads.
So the plan is:
Look I'm super glad wikipedia exists and I would love to replicate their model but they're a fucking miracle. "If wikipedia can do it, why can't you" is as valid as "if NASA can do it, why can't you".
Already being established also helps a lot to driving donations. The fact they already exist, already run lean, already provide value and already receive donations helps pay more.
Once established, your social network might work out. But there are zero guarantees it would get there. And it could take a decade to get there. A decade is the lifetime of most social networks in the first place.
Tildes has 10k registered users (less active), a single administrator (who isn't full-time on it), with a very, very specific mindset and AFAIU no plans to be of mainstream appeal (eg. get to 1M users). It's easier to live off donations when the risk of not having donations for a month is paying a bit out of pocket and not working as much on a site that mostly runs itself for a few weeks. Again, not a proper comparison.
PeerTube is probably the best example of a working prototype of a replacement to major for-profit sites today. It has a fuckton of investment behind it (government grants etc), and a LOT of questionmarks still.
I hate to sound flustered here but I seriously dislike this mindset that things can just run for free if you pray hard enough.
Funding is hard, but it isn't some miracle. The existence of any large nonprofit, not just web-based ones like Wikipedia are an example that nonprofits can exist as large organizations. Any meaningfully large nonprofit project could be described as "a miracle" or only something a for-profit business could do, but both points are incorrect.
If it is something folks believe in, funding is achievable. I don't believe for a second that a social media website is impossible to run as a nonprofit. Especially if the reason it exists is for a cause that a large enough coalition of people believe in, as mentioned in a previous comment.
It's hard, but not impossible, and it is not something that requires a miracle.
You realize non-profits still, by and large, usually have a business model? The tax structures etc make it easy for non-profits to ask for donations but if you look at, let's take the EFF for example, they're a law firm like any other and make their money primarily as lawyers.
Business is hard. Non-profits are even harder. Look at Mozilla: They have millions of users and struggle to make a business that doesn't rely on… "ad" space they're selling to Google.
I guess we'll just agree to disagree.
I just don't see any good reason to concede that social media is impossible to do by anything other than a for-profit business, especially when massive examples like The Internet Archive (archive.org), Wikipedia, heck even Khan Academy (among many others) exist.
It’s a shame, since a true solution to avert the social media situation we find ourselves in would be decentralized platforms like Mastodon, however they just don’t seem to be gaining any traction with casual users (the kids and grandmas who make up the majority of users, and are most susceptible to ads).
With so many insurmountable problems in the world today I’ve started to realign my personal philosophy that some of the only avenues of real change may have to come from within.
Outright rejection of the status quo isn’t sufficient since the status quo is too comfortable for the majority to drive change. Furthermore, taking yourself out of the equation (by deleting social media accounts) just leaves the pliable masses to remain. Instead, economic incentives need to be redesigned so that optimal strategies also provide net social good. Perhaps the only way to do that is with government intervention (e.g. Section 230 needs to be rewritten), but I’m searching for a model that can stand on its own two legs.
I think part of the blame for this fact is that there isn't a FOSS/decentralized/non-profit Snapchat, Instagram, or TikTok alternative. They are more or less Reddit clones. Nothing wrong with that, but the innovative approach that the aforementioned social media platforms take allows types of user interaction that existing non-profit alternatives can't provide. Look at the incredible creative content being made by users on TikTok for instance, these innovative feature sets just aren't something that exist among alternative non-profit social media sites.
I think the question we should ask ourselves isn't "how do we get folks to embrace a non-profit platform," it's "how do we make a platform that folks would want to embrace."
(Note: we also need to consider why we want an alternative. Is it for privacy? Digital autonomy? Free software philosophy? What type of coalition are we trying to build to make an alternative, and who all do we really need to keep happy to achieve whatever our collective goals are?)
In the topic of reddit monetizations, some ideas I think would work as additional streams of revenue are:
Selling data analytics - it's weird that pushshift is in many ways the way to datamine reddit. Reddit and Twitter are the two big social medias where trends of keywords and products can incredibly useful to A-B test different products or marketing strategies. It's not like any of it is private, or has the illusion of being private anyway. Reddit is very clearly a public forum.
Builting tools to index into the "creator economy" - Twitter is doing that now, and the two platforms share many elements. Reddit is a place where many creators share their works and build communities - why not cut out the Youtube, the substacks, the patreon's out of that equation? Build a way for users to "subscribe" to creators on Reddit to gain access to content, custom AMAs, that kind of thing.
Building brand building tools - The traditional forum is all but dead now, and Reddit has taken its place. Even big games like League, Riot has officially avowed the subreddit as their primary forum. Sell a service to brands that allow them a higher degree of customization on subs than just CSS.
Payments integration - with stripe or something, I don't think they should built it themselves, but you can see from all the subs about selling used goods that there's a community for it, and an opportunity for the niche of a trusted, and handy, payments option. Similar to Facebook marketplace.
Note I'm mostly considering viability rather than ethics, although I don't think any are that unethical. But with how Reddit works, it's kinda hard to successfully advertise apart from astroturfing + bots. Facebook, Insta, etc. have the luxury of having a feed be based on blackbox algorithms, which allow them to insert cleverly disguised ads in there.
Your suggestions definitely seem like viable monetization paths, although the more I think about them, the more I see the double edged sword of monetization that could have hamstrung Reddit this whole time.
Companies have even started looking at /r/wallstreetbets for ticker mentions and company discussions due to the Gamestop saga. This feels like low-hanging fruit to me, so why more companies weren't doing it before is beyond me. Lot's of untapped potential here, but it does present a potential feedback loop (e.g. the GameStop hearing was about market manipulation).
This walks a fine line between empowering a better relationship of brands with fans, and becoming Digg v4. I think crux of the issue with Digg's collapse was that they allowed the content to become the ads, driving out the user-generated content and turning users away. Reddit already has potential to be manipulated by power users and viral marketing from the likes of /r/HailCorporate, and they've also embraced native advertising on their infinite scroll redesign which seems to be in vogue with all of social media these days.
I think if the brands relationship on the site was clear and partitioned, it could work, particularly in places with dedicated communities already. As much as I would enjoy seeing a Wendy's account roast people in comment threads, the idea crosses too far into the uncanny valley of a Brave New World dystopia for me.
I think it could definitely take a bite out of Patreon, Etsy, etc.*, but without proper content identification/moderation it would be hard to stop content from overlapping with OnlyFans and potentially some dicey territory. There's similar challenges with determining the right ads to allow on appropriate content.
* I feel dumb for only now getting the joke on Etsy's brand name
Hmm, I don't think it's much of a departure from what we have already. These days many subs, especially game communities, are owned by employees of the company. And through Herculean efforts of abusing sub customization you get things like the live game tickers on /r/nba.
Company owned subs want that kind of integration but don't want to waste time developing through loopholes, and have money to spend.
I suppose it could get distasteful but tbh I think many subs already look distasteful so that ship has sailed.
My view is there's a big difference between sustainable and profitable. Reddit was sustainable for over a decade with a skeleton crew of a couple dozen or less. It's only since they've taken a billion dollars in VC funding and hired thousands of marketing people that they suddenly need to inundate the users with ads, force people to their app, etc.
Social media being one of the largest driving forces of the economy is unsustainable. The largest and most important companies on earth are those that allow you to post 140 characters of text. If the stock market is a measure of worth, this is worth more to humanity than most other industries that produce actual real tangible goods that feed clothe and house human beings. That's absurd. It costs very little to run a server. You don't need hundreds of millions, let alone billions of dollars a year to run even the most popular sites on the internet. You need that to sustain wall street's insatiable greed and demand for ever increasing profits.
I totally agree that the cost to run the service sustainably pales in comparison to the profits of some of these companies, but we live in a world where these social media companies do dominate our life in many ways. I would argue some of valuations are partly due to the massive influence these platforms have to "nudge" user behaviors enough at scale to change real-world outcomes.
Without getting into the ethics of whether or not these valuations are deserved, it looks to me that we're stuck living with the beast for the time being. Reddit is seemingly one of the largest social media companies that still hasn't yet found the right catalyst to monetization. Is there not an opportunity for it to find a "healthier" path that could justify its influence on the broader economy?
On one hand it might be fun to management consult a less tone deaf way forward for Reddit. It's in a unique position in the online marketplace and historically it's been an oasis of free speech, creativity and community. It's easy to cast it as the antidote to corporate social media. Monetization should be designed around that principle in order to maintain credibility.
On the other hand, Reddit leadership had made it clear through both statements and actions that what they want most of all is to join the other social media giants in selling their soul. And of course they want that, they've taken enough angel money that there's no longer any other choice.
Given that, I don't really want them to get advertising right. Sorry for straying from the topic :)
No no no and FUCK no! I'm well aware that I do not contribute to any discussion with this but I FUCKING HATE ADDS! WE don't need them stop saying it's inevitable and make people soften up to the idea. If adds become a part of this place I will leave immediately. I already support Tildes and will gladly support more just to be sure adds NEVER enters this site.