Reddit Launches Self-Serve Ads
Good news! Another popular website, Reddit, has launched a self-serve ad platform. This one is quite different from other self-serve ad platforms on social networks and such, both in target demographic and implementation. There is certainly room for making some money, and, as it is with all new advertising platforms, the most profit comes to those who get in early and come up with new ideas.
So how does it work? Well, rather than letting you make your own ads to throw into the banner rotation, your ads show up as frontpage posts on reddit’s site. They’re slightly different colored, though, but according to reddit’s website, they get a HUGE ctr. Here’s what it looks like:
Oh..for those of you who have never used Reddit, it’s a great social news site that lets users upvote stories they think are interesting and downvote stories they think do not deserve to be on the front page. This creates a nice democratic-ish type news site where you can see plenty of stories and funny stuff you wouldn’t find on traditional news sites. The majority of the users are internet nerds like yourself, so you’ll probably find many of the stories interesting.
Anyway, Reddit is very popular, and having anything on the frontpage is bound to drive a ton of traffic to your site, as discussed in this post Nickycakes recently made.  They are boasting a clickthrough rate of up to like 15% of unique users. So you could realistically expect 10-15% of individuals who see your ad to click it. That’s pretty damn good.
Creating ads is extremely easy. Maybe a little too easy. See for yourself:
These are ALL The options you get. Notice anything? The bidding only lets you specify how much you are willing to pay per day. Apparently how they are doing things is a little different from all the other self-serve ppc models out there. Instead of bidding a CPM or CPC amount, you are bidding how much you want to spend per day, which is pooled with all the other advertisers, and then you get a number of impressions based on that.  Confused?
Let’s say you bid $20 per day, and 9 other people are bidding $20 per day. The entire pool of bids is $200 and your bid represents 10% of that pool. So you take the entire day’s impressions available for self-serve ads, and your ad is seen 10% of that time. Lets say you then up your bid to $50. The entire pool of bids is now $230. Your bid represents roughly 22% of the entire pool, so your ads will be seen 22% of the time. The other $20 bids now only represent about 9% of the total pool, so they will see less impressions.
Nickycakes kinda likes this bidding method because it guarantees that the amount you bid will be spent, nothing more, nothing less.
They also have pretty decently detailed stats. Here is an example:
Hourly stats? Not bad!
So the tricky part is not creating the ad, but promoting something that people are actually interested in on Reddit. The readers of Reddit, for the most part, are pretty smart. They won’t be buying many acai berry supplements, but, being internet nerds like you, might spring for some online dating or even muscle building offers. You might try your hand at promoting some video game or comic related stuff through the amazon affiliate program, especially right now since people will also be doing christmas shopping and you might get credit for that on your cookie.
Enjoy, and as always, keep it real.
(some images jacked without permission from some dudes blog named tjantunen)
Interesting how they split up the views. I will watch and see what ad’s go up and what ones stick, because I’m sure this is one of the harder demo’s to get to spend easily. (as compared to other demo’s)
Warm outside today eh ?
Yeah, 41… nice and toasty.
10-15% CTR is a bit too optimistic. We ran some ads during the beta period (as did some of my friends) and we all averaged 4-5% CTR.
The graph they post is misleading because it’s for an ad that reddit ran about themselves on a day with no competition. Here’s a screenshot of our second ad… a lot more realistic: http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c31/subigo/Capture-9.png
nice. thanks for the info. 4-5% though is still really good ctr.
I’m liking this. I’m liking this a lot. Especially the max cost per day thing.
nice, will definitely check it out
But it also means that the more people advertise, the less exposure you gonna get for the same amount of money right?
Yes, which is true for any advertising platform that allows for competition.
Weak:
“Your promotion has been rejected for the following reason:
Please see our ToS: Your ad landing page and any page or pages redirected to may only redirect within the same domain”
Can’t use a tracking server? lame.
You use tracking that goes through a redirect?
Just my prosper
I can’t get past the email verification step. Anyone else having this problem? I’ve been waiting 3 hours to get the email from reddit with the verification link…
was almost instant for me. check your spam folder i guess
you must have slash dotted it with this article, i’ve now tried with half a dozen different accounts and email addresses. no dice. frustrating!
The reddit community is extremely engaged, but be careful what you advertise. The comments feature can lead to instant backlash.
Backlash? Still seems like they can just decide to vote down your site and you don’t lose anything.. any specific stories?
pretty much. no reason to enable comments as far as i can tell to be honest.
Also got dinged on the redirect (had a Prosper link before, just resubmitted with a straight up affiliate link and waiting to hear back but it still redirects of course…). Guess that means you can’t use direct linking on this platform?
Lame…
Nope, no direct linking – got rejected because affiliate link redirects.
Lame…
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