Tuesday, November 08, 2011

Calling all local businesses!

Before we announce our newest Free Ad campaign, we'd like to give you a brief follow up on how the Nonprofit Organization campaign we held in September turned out.

In just over two weeks, we gave away more than 250 free advertisements for anyone advertising for their favorite non-profit, equaling a grand total of $27,300 of ad space! The genres of campaigns ranged from Disaster Relief to Education, Health to Community Awareness, Fighting Poverty, Environmental Protection, Children, and Pet and Wildlife Safety and Protection. The turnout was astounding, and a special "Thanks!" to you, our awesome users, for engaging with these nonprofits. You gave feedback, asked questions, and gave donations when you could. We honestly couldn't have asked for a better community of redditors.


On to the new campaign

Now, with two successful free advertising successes under our belts, let's move on to our next big campaign: We're looking for Local Businesses who are interested in some free ad space through the month of November.

Owning a local, private business is like having three jobs and a new baby all at the same time — especially when you're first starting up. Also, these days, more community-oriented businesses are popping up than ever, and we want to help them live long and prosper.


But wait, there's more!

It's easy for a local business in a specific community to get lost in the advertising crowd. That's why, this time around, we are going to encourage them to target their ads to their community's subreddit if and when possible. There are tons of smaller subreddits dedicated to certain cities or regions, whose users would love to find out about fine establishments they've never heard of and are right under their noses.

If you pimp your local subreddit in the thread, we'll add it here as you go, and we will be sure to keep it in mind when businesses make inquiries as to where their ad would be best received.

Here is a great directory
of community oriented subreddits. Take a look and subscribe to yours!


How to get started.

If you run a business in your area, and would like to take advantage of this opportunity, it's simple. You need only a reddit username (which is free and very easy to register).Once you have a reddit account, visit this link to get your ad created. Once your ad is created (and this is very important), email me the "edit" link of your ad (don't click "pay"!) and I and our team will review your ad and give you the freebie. You also have the option of uploading a 70x70 pixel thumbnail, which is a great way to garner interest through imagery!


Tell me more about the free ad space.


What you'll get for your business is three days of advertising at a $100 spend. We encourage you to target your ad to your local community's subreddit — you'll have a much more captive audience, and more exposure than a site-wide run ad.


This is where YOU, the reddit community, comes in.

If you have a favorite local business, get out there and tell them about our campaign! And since we all know how hard it is to explain "reddit" to people (especially people who are too busy working long hours, and might not have time to be reddicted like most of us are), you can give them my email address, where they can get more information.

If you can manage to get a perfect stranger to sign up for a free ad, AND tell us that [YourScreenNameHere] sent them, you're going to get a month of reddit gold, on the house!

Tuesday, November 01, 2011

Grow A College Subreddit Competition Results


The college subreddit competition has come to an end. We tracked the growth of 463 college subreddits from August 20 to October 26 and the results were pretty impressive:
  • Subscribers to all college subreddits grew from 42,957 to 71,423
  • Traffic to those subreddits grew from 9,375 uniques/32,122 impressions per day to 30,196 uniques/118,943 impressions per day
  • Subreddits from 18 countries (Australia, Belgium, Canada, Costa Rica, England, Germany, Guatemala, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Philippines, Republic of Ireland, Scotland, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, United States, Wales)
  • Subreddits from 48 U.S. states plus Washington DC (Alaska and Wyoming are the only hold outs)
Subreddit growth was measured by subscriber count and traffic and was normalized by the total growth of all college subreddits. In addition to absolute growth we also looked at a weighted growth relative to each school's size.

Top 10 Absolute:
  1. Rochester Institute of Technology
  2. University of California, Los Angeles
  3. University of California, Berkeley
  4. University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
  5. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
  6. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
  7. University of Waterloo
  8. Rutgers University
  9. Texas A&M University
  10. Georgia Institute of Technology

Top 10 Relative:
  1. Rochester Institute of Technology
  2. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
  3. University of California, Los Angeles
  4. University of California, Berkeley
  5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  6. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
  7. Johns Hopkins University
  8. University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
  9. Georgia Institute of Technology
  10. St. John's College (United States)
We originally stated that there would be prizes for the top absolute growth, top relative growth, and admin's choice. We've decided to increase that to 7 winners:
Lots of engineering schools. Where are all the Liberal Arts students?

The winning schools will each get a box of goodies (shirts, stickers, surprises?) and we will change the frontpage style to reflect the school's logo for a day. Also depending on our availability we will try to organize some meetups/parties at the winning schools.

Great job everyone, now go study.

See some numbers here