Wednesday, October 02, 2013

Remaking Our Self-Serve Advertising System

The reddit self-service advertising system is going through a much-needed overhaul. This system is built in-house by reddit admins (with some valuable help from our ad server Adzerk) and allows for anyone with a reddit account (and a verified email address) to run sponsored headlines across reddit. This won’t affect much of your day-to-day use of reddit, but we wanted to explain what we’ve done and why we’re doing it.

A sponsored headline is the blue stickied post at the top of the page. These ads have been available for any redditor to purchase since 2009. These headlines are run differently than the image banners that show up on the right side of the site. The image based ads don't have a self-service option, but have always been sold on a CPM basis (CPM is an advertising term for the cost of 1,000 impressions).

The new self-service platform will be sold on a CPM basis. This means that there will be a set price (currently $0.75) for 1,000 impressions of your ad. This is a departure from our old pseudo-bidding system where you bought a portion of all available impressions — you named how much you were willing to spend, but you’d have little guarantee on how many impressions you’d get for that set price, which made it very difficult to tell how many people would see your ad. This semi-lottery based system prevented us from offering ads to reddit users in many countries outside of the U.S. (anyone that didn’t have credit cards in the U.S., U.K., and Canada weren’t able to purchase ads). It was tough to have to turn away many overseas redditors who had some great products, and we hope to welcome you back with our new system.

Sponsored headlines can now include dropdown text, marked by the “Aa” box. Advertisers are able to now use the longer text box to share stories about how they started their companies or products, link to other sources of information, or even excerpt a chapter from their book. We’ve had some advertisers set up campaigns, and though our sample size is small, early indications are that these ads do better because they are more informational and interesting — there are two times the average time on page on these ads compared to normal reddit post!

This is the first very important step in making the self-service platform a great advertising tool for the reddit community. To reiterate our commitment from last May, while reddit also runs ads from brands and outside companies, we want to build an ads system that is a community resource — a system for redditors to advertise to each other. As we grow this system, we want to add features of other robust self-serve systems, like enabling discount codes for redditors, A/B testing, or geotargeting — but we want to design it in a way to serve the reddit community’s own particular needs. For example, users may want to use it to inform others about causes they’re promoting, or to try and find more subscribers for a new subreddit they’ve just created - or simply to promote an event in a localized subreddit.

To set up an ad, you can visit the self-serve advertising tab in your account or go directly to the “create a promotion” page here.

We’re also experimenting with some new ways to use improve the ads themselves. Some are in the very early stages of development and might not make it, but the following list gives you an idea of ways we're trying to make ads better on reddit by keeping commercial messages separate, clearly identified, helpful and interesting. Advertisers interested in these experiments should email marketing@reddit.com; moderators can PM us at /r/reddit.com.
  • Subreddit ad buyouts.  In April, /r/gamedeals moderators self-posted about how frustrated they were with affiliate link sponsored headline ads in the subreddit. A redditor from Amazon saw it and worked with us on a solution: Amazon bought out all the /r/gamedeals sponsored headline ads, using some for non-commercial posts and donating its affiliate fee from /r/gamedeals sales to a non-profit. We’ve had this arrangement for the past few months, and it seems to be making the site better for /r/gamedeals redditors. Since the sponsorship, the subreddit traffic has doubled. 
  • Q&A ads.  We like the format of advertisers answering questions about their products or companies, and want to encourage these conversations. So we’re testing ads where one or more employees of a company answer questions from redditors to see how they do and how you respond.
  • Thank you” messages.  We’re working with folks to help them spread positive messages that are not really ads. We’ve seen several advertisers buy ads to thank the reddit community, and we love those ads, because they cared enough to let people know that they enjoy their time interacting on reddit. For example, J Cole was so excited after his AMA in /r/hiphopheads, he took out an ad as a “thank you.” 
  • Smaller ads. We’re working on reconfiguring our ad system to test the 300x100 ad as our default banner ad, replacing our standard 300x250 ad in many cases. This change frees up more space on the sidebar for subreddit content and also encourages advertisers to customize their ads for the reddit community.
  • Sponsored contests. We have had a few companies reach out to us about their interest in giving back to the reddit community through sponsored contests in a variety of subreddits. We've tested this out in a couple of places with some pretty good results, so we're excited at the prospect of doing more around the site! We still have to work out some of the finer details, but keep your eyes peeled for sponsored contests in a subreddit near you.
What are we are keeping the same:
  • Still no flash
  • No front page roadblocks of sponsored headlines
  • No autoplay video or audio
  • No retargeted ads 
We’ve improved our self-service advertising system recently to make it more consistent, understandable and global. We are working on other improvements to our advertising, and testing out different ad formats, too. We appreciate your feedback in /r/ads, /r/selfserve, and elsewhere, so please keep it coming.
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