Reddit’s advertisers are already a bit wary. I honestly don’t think it would take much more than a couple of dozen boycott threats via twitter, facebook, whatever for a marketing team to decide it’s not worth the drama and move their advertising dollars elsewhere.
Unlike other controversies where brands can try to appeal to one side or the other, there aren’t really “sides” to this. There’s just people that are vehemently opposed to Reddit’s current actions, and people that don’t care and want to look at memes. The only people that are going to be happy that (eg) IBM are advertising on Reddit is Spez and his staff.
This seems like a simple thing the average Redditor can do right now, and I don’t think it would take much to make a real impact.
I just fired off a bunch of tweets to the advertisers I can see (they seem very regional)…
Thoughts?
True. But still, marketing teams are pretty skittish and a couple of dozen negative tweets or something is often enough for them to bail just to avoid even the potential for getting caught in a controversy.
Particularly as, unlike political controversies, there’s nobody to get pissed off with them for bailing…
Thankfully there are plenty, plenty political controversies associated with Reddit that people can - and should - bring up from the grave. It’s all about contextualising them to show that Reddit Inc. still has the same “corporate values” as back then, and that it would likely do the same crap as it did before. (For example, have you heard about TD?)