Also reddit itself gives a huge number of ways for advertisers to access the reddit audience without paying for it.

I think this is reddit's biggest issue. Astroturfing is more effective than advertising and it's cheaper too.

Astroturfing as in hopping into a group and creating a post promoting your product? Have you ever seen that actually work?

Almost every subreddit I see bans any kind of promotion and even posting of links.

The number of pictures that are actually just ads upvoted to the front page was absolutely astonishing when I used reddit. I didn't understand how people could see a Coke can with a funny name on it and not realize that was an advertisement.

>Winning strategy for them might be to try and get more older users who don't care about ads so much and have lots of money

Isn't the most sought-after demographic 18-35 because they have the most disposable income? Afterwards disposable income drops off because of kids and/or retirement.

That demographic is most sought-after by advertisers because it is the easiest to influence. The ads work better on them.

For whatever reason, maybe just because they've seen more ads, older demographics are harder to reach.

> For whatever reason, maybe just because they've seen more ads, older demographics are harder to reach.

Fascinating - in my experience older generations are much, much easier to beguile online.

My guess would be the Reddit demographic is much less receptive to ads than the average, say, FB user.

Is it actually true that online ads work better (more conversions?) on that demographic? How do you separate the confounding factor of the effect of age and income on preferences?

This is absolutely not true. Setting aside product market fit, older demos are better, ideally conservative.

Product-Market fit is of course important. No point in marketing Red Bull to older demographics; the product was not designed for them. Aside from products targeted at one demographic or the other, older audiences are more skeptical, and have seen all of the ad gambits in earlier forms before.

Imagine the person saying "don't believe everything you read in the news" Is that an older person talking to a younger one, or vice-versa?

Not by a long shot. Boomers are still the highest in spending[1]. I was a broke college student forever and somewhat broke for the years or so after (no loans I worked through college). I’m in the 30-40 range with kids and I spend much more than my twenties.

Lots of college students are spending their parents money for these kinds of things.

[1] https://resources.datadrivenmarketing.equifax.com/dyks-equif...

While older consumers do have more money to spend, most advertisers prefer to target younger consumers. The thinking is that boomers already have established brand preferences and spending patterns so it's much harder to convert them into new customers.

This is only really true for television advertising, since most of it is brand building, instead of "click here and buy now" online.

> Winning strategy for them might be to try and get more older users who don't care about ads so much and have lots of money

Won't be easy getting older users on a site where "boomer" is a slur.

> Reddit is more forum than social network

Reddit is mostly cat pictures and funny memes at scale, even calling it a "forum" is a stretch. More like a glorified image board.

Two specific feeds, /r/popular and /r/all, are a lot of this.

There are a lot of good niche communities that have deep, meaningful conversation on Reddit.

He is clearly unaware of /r/cannedsardines

I've started to add +Reddit in Google searches to obtain useful information when I need to know something. With all those fake top 10 list sites and paid reviews showing up in searches, Reddit is pretty much the only place left for getting reliable product information, for example. There are friendly and knowledgeable subreddits about all kinds of topics.

Yeah. Doing a Google search for best anything returns pages of content farms and Pinterest links. Remember when Google search used to be good?

I'm not sure I understand your taxonomy. In my mind, an image board is a type of forum (generally anonymous and ephemeral). Reddit is more like a forum than a typical forum than popular imageboards, since users have long-lived identities and posts are permanent by default.

As far as "most cat pictures and memes", maybe it is, by volume. But that doesn't diminish the substantial corpus of more substantive, forum-like, discussion hosted on the site.