• redimk@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I wonder if advertisers have been leaving Reddit and if so, how many? I’ve honestly never seen a social media website/company ask for advertisers like this tbh.

    I’m not a lot on social media to begin with, so I’m not sure.

  • ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    A quote that always stuck with me was: “‘Your ad here’ signs are proof that the ad spot doesn’t work well, otherwise someone would have put their ad there.”

  • Rogue_General@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Am I wrong in thinking this is sad as hell? Like seeing an old faded billboard with the same “your ad here!” text that’s been there for ages.

    • beardsley@midwest.social
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      1 year ago

      Hats off, that’s both an argument for the use of third party apps and for eliminating third party apps at the same time…

        • fishhf@reddthat.com
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          1 year ago

          We are just saving them money, imagine the amount of API calls for serving Ads to everyone /s

      • Izzy@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Buy an ad for Lemmy. Edit: I seem to have clicked the wrong reply location. I don’t feel like deleting it though.

      • x4740N@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I use libredirect in Firefox and Google Web cache for reddit if there’s only an answer I can find there

    • 👽🍻👽@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Ya. That is a large part (not the only reason) of why Huffman gambled and lost on killing 3rd party apps. People using Apollo, or any other app that wasn’t the trash official app, weren’t getting ads at all or were giving their ad dollars to a third party. By killing third party apps, that forces anyone who actually wants to use Reddit to use the official suck ass app or the garbage desktop site which also had alt options that used the API. When users are funneled into only using official Reddit products, that means they’re only consuming ads that Reddit makes a profit from.

      I used Bacon Reader for almost ten years. It didn’t have ads for half a decade and when ads did come, it was a non intrusive banner ad at the bottom. The Reddit app is riddled with obstructive ads. So is the website unless using an ad blocker. Reddit when used the way the admins want, is just one ass blast of shitty ads.

      • AirlineF0od@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        🥓 for the win. 😢 tears shed. 🥓 was the best. I think my app store purchase was about 2014. I was on bacon for about 9 years I think.

      • XanXic@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It’s an unfortunate reality but that’s probably going to have to happen. Instances can’t be expected to grow and maintain on pure goodwill. Some might get by with donations but it’s pretty known that Mastodon servers that couldn’t support themselves on donations vanished. It’s a huge ask for someone to pay money, time and effort to run a server for perpetuity. Usually you can only ask for 2 out of the 3 lol.

        We already saw the original lemmynsfw get overwhelmed and just want to shut it down and hand it to someone else because they were having to put in so much work.

        Hopefully because Lemmy is opt in in every sense, instance owners can do an ad setup that isn’t intrusive or over bearing.

        Otherwise it’s just the big instances that are donation covered that stay and grow and Lemmy just becomes centralized around 5 servers or something.

        • time_lord@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          archive of our own does a fundraising event, and asks for donations until they get to their target. I could see Lemmy instances following the same model; if they do it right and get themselves listed as a non-profit, they can even get fundraising functionality into an app, and set it up so that Apple doesn’t take their 30% cut.

          • XanXic@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            This works if you have an audience already though. Small instances won’t have that already but they’ll be expected to federate and hold like 40 servers worth of data/content just to start up and not seem dead. Then try to grow their user base, and without ads as the norm beg them to donate as they scale up. Or just do it at a loss for a long time which really reduces the pool of people willing to run a Lemmy instance that isn’t a shithead.

            There’s already another reply saying if an instance runs ads just leave it. And this exact stance is why so many Mastodon servers have shut down. In some cases apparently when servers started showing ads to their users, other servers defederated them as a show of force against it. And then they withered and died.

            As onboarding costs get higher and the amount of new users signing up dwindles instance growth is going to stagnate then probably go negative. Unless everyone can be chill about stuff like ads like I said we’ll end up with just 4-5 big servers who let’s be honest are just early adopters not necessarily the best places. Or Facebook who can spend money like no other, shove their users in, and will just control the whole thing.

            I don’t want ads but we’ve seen how mastodon failed and users retaliating against them was a big issue.

            • SpaceAape@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Don’t forget you can always self host one’s own instance and access the larger fediverse from it, without Ads. So because it’s open source, itll always be easy to access the fediverse with an Ad free experience. A personal instance doesn’t need to grow, scale, host 40gb of data, or have any content at all either so it doesn’t come with the issues of a public instance.

              Or Facebook who can spend money like no other, shove their users in, and will just control the whole thing.

              This just doesn’t make sense at all. IF Fb ever added ActivityPub support (it would take a huge rework of their format) but instances would just defederate from it like they did with ad supported instances. And then what is even the point of FB ActivityPub support if their exiled.

        • ShrimpsIsBugs@programming.dev
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          1 year ago

          I also think, we’ll have ads at some point - and that’s perfectly fine and understandable as long as these ads aren’t too many and aren’t too intrusive. My hope is that because of lemmy’s federated nature a healthy competition will emerge. So whenever an instance starts overloading the users with ads, users will just move to another instance with less adds at the blink of an eye.

      • Nailbar@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        How to fund the instance is up to the instance owner. The one I’m on has a Patreon. Not sure how the bigger ones are managing.

    • Cyrus Draegur@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Made me instinctively downvote (do we still call it that?) before I finally realized what the post was really about XD

    • LordOfTheChia@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The best ad I saw for Reddit (back before the grand Digg migration) was one day, everyone agreed to stop posting direct links to articles and instead post the links to the Reddit discussions for said articles.

      Suddenly, one day, the entire Digg feed was links to Reddit.

      We should do the same thing (on say 8/1) to give time for the different federated instances to get accustomed to the higher traffic, more activity on the feed, and more people to welcome the future Reddit refuges, just like Redditors once welcomed us during the Digg 4.0 exodus.

      • Cyrus Draegur@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        It would be funny and I’d love to see it but you KNOW spez and his butthurt bootlicking simps are petty enough to block/ban any link that goes to any address that’s associated with a Lemmy instance AND instantly “permanently suspend” any account that participates.

        Reddit admins even ejected their favorite agitator powermod, u/awkwardthepanda, for posting a John Oliver picture.

        They are truly prepared to burn every bridge.

        But maybe that’s the point. Maybe they should be FORCED to burn every bridge and annihilate themselves in the inferno.

    • Syrc@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      And give money to Reddit? Hell no. Let’s see how much time they take to refill those ad slots by themselves.

      • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Honestly? If it’s a way to siphon users away from Reddit and towards Lemmy, we all need to look at this sort of thing as an investment. Sure, it gives Reddit some cash up front… but it also siphons away their primary value proposition to advertisers: the user base.

        Running subreddit-specific ads pushing lemmy/fediverse-hosted alternative for a couple months will do WONDERS in the long term.

        And yes, it’s distasteful to give Steve money, but at the same time, giving him a comparatively small amount of cash now will ultimately end up taking a far, FAR more significant amount of money away from him later, in the form of audience count he can offer to his advertisers.

        • Syrc@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I don’t know, I really don’t believe ads can do that much wonders. I mean, apparently they do because otherwise we wouldn’t have the whole internet plastered with them, but I personally don’t think I’ve ever actually clicked on an ad in my entire life.

          • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            Well you see, people like you and me, who are borderline obsessive about our refusal to interact - or even be presented - with ads, are unfortunately very definitely outliers in terms of user archetypes on the modern internet.

            • Syrc@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Most sources I’ve seen claim that 42% of internet users use Adblockers, and the percentage obviously goes up as the age goes down. Considering the average Reddit user’s age, the adblocking users might as well be the majority, so if you count in the people who don’t block them but don’t click on them either I don’t think it’s going to make that much of an impact.

              And honestly I’m not even that obsessive about my ad experience, it’s more that they rarely have anything I would be remotely interested about.

      • chicagohuman@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago
        • Tired of ads like this? Try Lemmy!
        • If you were federated, you’d be home now.
        • Reddit wants to show you ads.
        • Consume. Or federate.
      • Confuzzeled@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Maybe something like, “Your ad could be here or if you’re sick to the back fucking teeth of ads you should come to lemmy”

          • NABDad@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Choice. If an instance starts adding in ads, people will move to another instance. If they find a way to be invasive enough to be seen by users in other instances, they would probably be defederated.

          • NABDad@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Choice. If an instance starts adding in ads, people will move to another instance. If they find a way to be invasive enough to be seen by users in other instances, they would probably be defederated.

                • BeardedGingerWonder@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  The choice is the thing, I think. It’s what made the whole Reddit thing a bit bizarre for me. Like they could’ve just passed the ads through the API and used personal API keys in 3rd party apps. Those content to take the ads take them and those who prefer to pay a fee can do so.

                  “We need to pay for this shit, it’s up to you how we do it” is a much easier sell IMO than “you’ll use our app and you’ll fucking like it”

              • NABDad@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Perhaps, but I think the nature of Lemmy discourages the brute force aggressive ads that you can see elsewhere.

  • Shotgun_Alice@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I saw that on my few last days on Reddit. I was wondering about their rates b/c I was wondering what it would cost to take out an ad calling spez a complete twat.

  • WindyRebel@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Having tried to use Reddit advertising for business (a national company), it really wasn’t very good. They had very poor targeting and algorithms.

    • phoneymouse@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I have a family member that runs their company digital advertising strategy. Said the same thing… and that it was hard to track conversions. They ended up pulling their ads.

      • Triumphant_Victor@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I work in the digital advertising industry…reddit is pushing hard to grow it’s advertising business and are being helped by major players in the industry.

        I’ve been tracking it for a while, because I know it was foreshadowing the decline of reddit as I knew it

        • zos_kia@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Plus they have this unique position of being able to serve niche ads right in the place where that niche happens. You don’t really need to be a genius to make that work, even if you have shit algorithms, the targetting is done for free by just selecting the right subreddits. It is one of the rare places where actually useful advertising could happen, that’s a market that’s currently being served by nobody.

      • WindyRebel@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yup. That was our experience too! My boss and I were both Redditors and we thought it would be cool.

        Narrator: It wasn’t.

    • andrew@radiation.party
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      1 year ago

      Reddit has attempted, multiple times, to reach out to Andrew Tate to partner with him on advertisements, including twice while he was imprisoned.

      I know this because their numbskull marketing folks can’t proofread the email address they’re sending outreach to, and I received the outreach emails as a result. Thanks, Reddit!

    • ChrisLicht@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I took a pitch from a Reddit ad sales rep in May, and he admitted to not really using the site.

  • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    If you go to the URL in the ad and click on “get started,” you will see something interesting:

    An 800 number.

    • Kittengineer@lemmy.world
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      I’m fine with ads. It costs money to run servers and build out the platform.

      I’m not fine with the absolutely sleezy way spez handled the api changes and the ridiculous price. Utterly disrespectful to the mods, third party app devs, and Reddit users.

        • Dr. Santa@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Problem is that such isn’t a stable source of income.

          Though I guess Wikipedia makes it work. So I dunno.

      • BrerChicken @lemmy.world
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        Just because things cost money doesn’t mean that ads are the best way to pay for them, or that we have to accept advertising as part of the process. I ABHOR advertising, but I don’t mind signing up to support someone on Patreon, like I’m doing with the developer of the instance I’m on.

        • AVeryCleverName@lemmy.one
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          I love the lack of ads, but I suppose I could live with them as long as they were clearly distinguished from real user content. I hated those reddit ads that were from a reddit account and looked like just another post if you didn’t pay attention to the flair.

        • Revan343@lemmy.ca
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          I honestly don’t even mind targeted ads, just sleezy ones. Targeted ads means I get ads for GPUs instead of health insurance.

          What really annoys me is how many shitty off-the-mark ads I get from Google, despite the fact that they ought to know literally everything about me. LIke, if you’re going to massively invade my privacy, why aren’t you even using that information?

  • dan@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    It’s fairly reasonable to assume advertisers are leaving. This isn’t one of those controversies that has two sides, it’s just Reddit being shitty because they want to make more money, and mods, users and disabled people on the other side being annoyed with Reddit.

    There’s very little for advertisers to lose by redirecting their ad budget elsewhere, but if they stick around there’s a risk that annoyance spills over to them.

    It also doesn’t take much for marketing teams to make a change - they do it all the time to stay on the right side of controversies and avoid things they don’t want to be associated with.

  • Raildrake@vlemmy.net
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    1 year ago

    Step 1: Announce very unpopular changes

    Step 2: Ignore backlash, go through with the plan

    Step 3: Predictably, lose users and advertisers

    Step 4: ???

    Step 5: Why advertise on reddit?