Now, that's one fundamentally DUMB idea if you pardon my French.
If I am interested in hemorrhoid suppositories, it doesn't mean I want to hear about them all the time, e.g. when eating a parfait.
Subs exist because they provide context, focus and isolation of the content. You start stuffing unrelated crap there - you f*ck up the very core of the reddit experience.
That having been said, this should definitely at least be an option.
Just don't show ads for /r/abc when it's not a part of the current view.
CPMs should have gone down, not up, since your inventory was expanded meaning same demand for expanded supply. Y'all should also have reduced the minimum allowed bid down from 0.20 since you were expanding your inventory artificially w/ a coding change.
You should have also expected that CPAs for your advertisers were going to go way down once you removed the ad from it's intended context.
Either the logic driving the changes was weak or your explanation is lacking the whole truth.
I see a business in Reddit who wasn't pleasing it's investors and did something hasty to increase revenue.
There was no official communication of the subreddit targeting change to existing advertisers.
> CPMs should have gone down, not up, since your inventory was expanded meaning same demand for expanded supply.
This really depends, there's more supply available to you, but you're potentially competing against more advertisers as well. e.g. if, for example, there's high overlap between visitors to /r/jerky and /r/dota2 you might see increased CPMs, if there's not other advertisers competing for your same inventory you'd see lower CPMs.
Offcolour background, a little megaphone saying "promoted", all the way at the top of the subreddit, and offtopic (this ad was on /r/HFY)
Why do you keep ignoring this point?
Seems like Reddit could offer an additional option that limits display to a particular sub only. That way their bigger advertisers could still "spend more" to follow a jerky subscriber around but bold_panda could buy only /r/jerky inventory
What will end up happening is that bigger advertisers will spam the hell out of everyone, so people will start ignoring/blocking all ads, including more benign sub-specific ones.
A much better option would be to give users an option of suppressing cross-sub ads. This will still show sub's ads when a user is on the sub, which is something that people may actually want.
Strict relevancy of the ads is the key here. This is what reddit ads have had going for them before this change and it was their biggest and unique strength.
It's fine to enable wider targeting, but the problem is you also removed the ability to target more specifically, which will drive away advertisers focused on conversion percentage.
My recommendation: enable both "general" (recently visited sub) and "specific" (subscribed to sub) targeting. When displaying an ad, pick the one that has the highest CTR for the current subreddit.
> While we haven't done any sort of official analysis of CPM changes here, the expected
Sounds incredibly suspect. How could you make such a big change and not test it?
Thanks for your team's work on the new self-serve platform!
I guess the simple middle ground here is to charge different fee for subscribers vs. subreddits.
Want to target the 17 million subscribers on /r/pics? You have to pay a low fee. But if you have to be seen by one of those 1700 people viewing r/pics right now? Pay higher.
It addresses the concerns of redditors like bold_panda as well as helps maximize inventory utilization.
If that was considered but not implemented, do the comments in this thread change your opinion?
How exactly do you evaluate "brand safe"? I can rarely get my own marketing department to a decision on this sort of thing in less than a few hours, yet you seem to be claiming you can do this on the fly for many advertisers.
Yes, I have noted that your definition of "brand safe" seems to be rather narrower than mine 8)
It's extremely hard to believe anyone thought a single post view was a strong enough interest indicator to be a reliable conversion.
I want to believe it was a communication error, but your explanation here sounds like you intentionally diluted the ad value.
To clarify what happened here, around the time we released our new ads platform - 6 months ago - we made some changes to targeting. Specifically, we modified subreddit targeting so that recent visitors to a subreddit or a post from a subreddit could also qualify to see ads targeted to that subreddit. We did not make any changes to how users who subscribe to a subreddit see ads (subreddit subscribers have been eligible to see ads targeted to a subreddit as long as they are visiting safe for work content since this commit ~2 years ago: https://github.com/reddit/reddit/commit/f6a37b64c17579b82e22...)
The release of our new ads platform also coincided with a re-release of our help center docs, which detail how subreddit targeting works. You can see the specific page here: https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/advertising/targeti...
As noted there: "Targeting a subreddit means you are targeting the subscribers and recent visitors of that subreddit. Subscribers can see your ad while visiting the targeted subreddit and on other subreddits if they recently visited that targeted subreddit."
We made this change in response to advertiser feedback that they would like to see an increase in targeted inventory, the idea being that if you're interested in jerky when you're on /r/jerky you're also interested in jerky when you're not on /r/jerky. This change has helped a good number of our advertisers successfully expand budgets while still meeting their return on ad spend goals, specifically for advertisers that target smaller subreddits regularly. We of course also limit the subreddits your ads can show on outside of the targeted subreddit to ones that are similarly "brand safe" to the ones you are targeting. (e.g. if you are explicitly targeting only NSFW subs your ad will show up on other NSFW subs, but if you're not targeting NSFW subs your ad will never show up on a NSFW sub)
While we haven't done any sort of official analysis of CPM changes here, the expected effect of this change was that advertisers would be able to spend significantly more budget (a specific request of many of our advertisers). An expected side effect is that CPMs might possibly increase due to more bids on a per-impression basis, but since you're bidding on a wider range of inventory I would expect that you would be able to reduce your CPMs and still spend the same budget you were spending before, with similar performance.
If there's something I can do to help please don't hesitate to email me directly ([email protected]). In the future for ads problems we also hang out on https://www.reddit.com/r/redditads