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.
Clicking an image on Twitter and it actually being an external link was the last thing I ever did on that platform.
Ads are not the only reason, but if you’re still on reddit, you clearly missed the point why reddit became popular.
Welcome to 5 years ago? This has been around for years…
How is this news? Reddit has been doing this for literally years.
Isnt that how they always looked?
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.
Times have changed…
Too bad that “Greed” is not just the name of the minor antagonist from Full Metal Alchemist…
Thus even more annoying. I mean at this point I dont even feel like they care.
Solution is simple, community should turn any suspiciously product focused thread into an advertisers nightmare of filth
Then the ads will just be the ones with the comment sections turned off
Yeah, let’s turn our space into a cesspool! We’ll show those darned invaders!
i don’t think many people would consider posts that are literally paid advertisements part of “our space”
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 🤷♀️Didnt work out for Cinnamon 😂
What are you referring to?
They are getting more subtle. Ever notice how actors suddenly rise to the top? Posts about how awesome they are, or how great things they have done are? Right before I left Reddit it was awash with Pedro Pascal and how amazing and humble and down to earth he was, then the new mandalorian came out and after a few weeks, no one gave a fuck about our new god.
I remember I first noticed it years ago when there was this sudden craze for Bradley Cooper, and how he spoke French (really broken, highschool level French). And everyone was amazed at it like speaking a second language made him amazing. It felt really weird and condescending how much praise he was getting for being willing to not only speak to these “lowly foreigners” in “their crazy language”, but also to bother to learn it in the first place. And all I could think was “you’re talking about French right? An optional language that’s taught and the vast majority of high schools across the US?” I mean good on him and great job, but wtf? And then suddenly silence… Bradley who?
Reddit’s new paid ads look exactly like user posts
So what’s new?
It happens here, too. Like this shill post about the Scrub Daddy, where the comments are highly suspicious.
It even happens in RL conversations, say, with people who bought stock of a big company subtly (or they think it looks so) recommending it.
Right? Been that way for quite a while. One of the main reasons I refused to use the app.
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.
Broodje Mexicano superiority, or even just the Kwik Trip equivalent.
Wow. Everyone, ignore this guy, he’s also an ad.
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!
Whenever I’m stressed out about too many ads, I take Fark-It-All. Ask your doctor if Fark-It-All is right for YOU.
This.
I tried Fark-It-All and it legit helped me reduce my stress level a lot. After Amazon drove up its Ads I felt I realy couldn’t take it any more. And since there is literally nothing you can do about ads, neither on reddit nor on Amazon, I looked for other options. And what can I say? Taking some Fark-It-All brings the fun back into funding, hypercapitalist corpations trough engaging with Ads. I highly recommend Fark-It-All, even if you just feel like you could potentialy be stressed out a bit by Ads. I’ve heard a lot of realy positive feedback on taking it preventative.
No /s, it realy is the shit. Just try it out and see for yourself.
You plant shit seeds, you get shit weeds.
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.
Honestly your mental health has almost certainly improved since leaving that place.
Their algorithms are designed to pump engagement and outrage. They want you either scared or angry and it sucks.
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.
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.
The biggest problem with lemmy is that we don’t have a good way to search for info.
Usually I do shit like “reddit monitor recommandation”, and I’ll get some thread where I can read opinions.
We can’t do they with lemmy 😐
A while back somebody posted info on how to make a custom DDG search that would search the most common Lemmy instances with one keyword. If you’re interested I can go digging for it.
I disagree, Lemmy’s built in search function is much better than reddit’s because it lets you search for comments on any instance that you federate with.
Reddit afaik still has no comment search
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.
Not sure the FTC is going to be a big fan of this…
First GDPR now this, they don’t give one fuck and try to cash out
If I hadn’t already left, this would probably have been the thing that did it for me.
Recently went on Reddit and laughed hysterically at the amount of religious propaganda I saw in this format. Example:
-religious propaganda -gambling bullshit (including crypto/crypto adjacent bullshit) -military brainwashing/propaganda -alcohol ads
Just the worst fucking garbage bullshit.
r/Atheism held the line for decades, and y’all cyberbullied them for it.
-military brainwashing
Yvan eht nioj
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.
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%.
Reddit’s metrics are about to go to shit.
15 percent for banner ads is actually pretty good.
Yeah. That’s why OP mentioned it.
But his point is that that number has gone down to shit because later the banner ads became shit.
If the ads weren’t terrible, people would not have invented and popularised the ad-blocker.
