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.

  •  Seiya   ( @Seiya@lemmy.fmhy.ml ) 
    22•1 year ago

    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.

  •  SirNuke   ( @SirNuke@kbin.social ) 
    17•1 year ago

    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.

    •  OsrsNeedsF2P   ( @OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml ) OP
      10•1 year ago

      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.

  •  lagomorphlecture   ( @lagomorphlecture@lemm.ee ) 
    5•1 year ago

    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.

  •  MetaStatistical   ( @MetaStatistical@lemmy.film ) English
    4•1 year ago

    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.