Reddit To Offer Premium Ad Space
Just a couple of days ago, Reddit launched its latest advertising system. The product, known as Trending Takeovers is causing quite a stir with its ability to allow brands an entire day of placing their ads exactly where advertisers would want them, namely on Reddit’s popular feed and within their search tab. Reddit claims it will present brands with a chance to drive debate and discussion.
Shariq Rizvi, who deals with Ads at Reddit commented: “With millions of searches taking place every day and over one-third of users coming to Reddit’s Popular feed daily, brands can now be part of where cultural trends are born online—Reddit. Reddit, a large focus for 2020 is about maximizing new and premium opportunities for brands to authentically engage with Reddit users.”
When a Reddit user clicks on one of the artificial trends they will be redirected to a page with content from that company at the top of the page and related discussion underneath. One example of this is Samsung who had a trend called “found on galaxy” this connected to the release of the Galaxy S20 Ultra.
We can expect to see the full version of this product in roughly six months when the Beta is over. Taking part in the testing process are 15 companies including Spotify and Adobe.
Reddit has been trying for a good while to lure advertisers to the platform. Way back in 2016 they introduced programmatic advertising. And as recently as last January they introduced cost per click adverts.
A Reddit spokesperson claimed that the Beta has turned up some interesting results with a rate of about 5 percent moving from the advertisers landing page to their actual website. That’s more than double the standard rate. They have yet to announce the price of this service though.
It is suggested that prices may hit six-figure sums. Regular ads in trending categories can command around 25k according to a relevant buyer. They also suggest that something in the trending area can command a much greater reach at the expense of a shorter time frame. After all, a promoted trend on twitter can cost up to a quarter of a million. It is thought that it won’t be as high as that and it will be tweaked to fit with the user.
Adobe is one of the first advertisers to run with the idea. Back last September they came up with a campaign for a product called layers.
One of the marketing leads at Adobe, Ellen Vanderwilt commented on the campaign saying, “We were buying ads in the core Adobe creative subreddits, and this gave us the chance to go way broader and reach a lot more folks.” So that suggests that Vanderwilt was impressed with the results, adding: “We had over 150,000 people contribute layers to the effort. I think 120,000 of them were unique, and 11 million people visited the page. And those numbers were just a lot higher than we expected.”
Most people who use Reddit do so due to its extensive network of Subreddits. This niche communities have a massive following and allow more than 430 million users to discuss various common interests.
As Neal Hubman, Reddit’s head of growth points out:
“There’s no brand that doesn’t have relevant communities on Reddit already talking about either their actual product or specific things that the brand is most focused on.”
However, it might be a bit of a fantasy to suggest that people go on to Subreddits looking for specific brands. As Vanderwilt points out a certain amount of trust with users is required to avoid turning them away. She added, “Reddit can be an intimidating place for brands so it made sense for us to do something to build a lot of goodwill, to really celebrate creativity and establish us as a brand that gets the Reddit community and Redditors—and then run ads that we partnered with Reddit to create.”
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