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Reddit's new paid ads look exactly like user posts (www.zdnet.com)

submitted 6 months ago by ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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.

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[-] w2tpmf@lemmy.world 48 points 6 months ago

So they seriously not remember what thousands of people left Digg and moved to their platform for???

Reddit had a fraction of the users Digg had at one point. Then Digg changed to a new UI no one liked and started putting adds that looked like posts into the main feed.

[-] Asafum@feddit.nl 20 points 6 months ago

I literally would look for reddit posts about suggestions for various things specifically because they weren't ads.

Thanks spez for fucking killing one of the few resources I had that wasn't just paid bullshit lying about what products are worth a shit...

[-] WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 21 points 6 months ago

Let's be honest here. Reddit had been astroturfed for over a decade, and a majority of posts that spoke favourably of products were ads.

The only value Reddit had in that regard is through Google surfacing the valuable discussions and content (e.g. the ones that weren't the ads).

[-] andros_rex@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Reddit from the beginning had bot accounts to artificially inflate its number of users.

[-] Hammerheart@programming.dev 1 points 6 months ago

That was before learned helplessness became a staple of the internet experience, i think a lot fewer reddit users will be motivated to leave compared to the people who left digg for reddit.

Happy to be proven wrong, though.

this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024

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