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.
Well few days ago their valuation by I think Fidelity got cut from 10b to 5.5b. That should tell you something
That was before the whole clown show. The valuation cut was dated May 31st
Even better.
Steve Huffman just following the footsteps of Elon Musk, during a recent interview Spez said he liked what Musk was doing with Twitter.
Twitter has lost 59% of their advertisement sales since Musk bought it.[1](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/technology/twitter-ad-sales-musk.html)
[1] ↩︎
Yay Poppin!
PoppinKREAM!!! In the fediverse!! Oh hell yeah!
I need context lol, who’s Poppincream?
Reddit User who would show up with cited sources debunking bullshit other people would ardently defend in lieu of educating themselves.
When Musk said he wanted twitter to be the town square he was clearly meaning a medieval town square with people throwing their chamber pots out the windows and the streets running with effluent and the wells tainted with cholera.
Major woof if true. u/spez is a true big brain business man.
The cut was multi-staged and started middle of last year. The most recent cut was relatively small (10-15% iirc). As others have pointed out, that reduction doors not take into account the recent self-inflicted wounds.
It’s down almost 50% since they bought in in 2021 lmao
I’ve heard unsubstantiated claims that traffic to the advertiser portal has dropped ~40% since the protests started
I personally reached out to about a dozen advertisers, urging them to reconsider their marketing efforts on Reddit. After privatizing the subreddit I had moderated for 12 years, it seemed like the next logical step.
Damn that’s commitment, I respect the effort
This kind of actions give hope, and their impact shouldn’t be underestimated! Writing a personal message is one of those things that trigger the ‘authenticity’ all these marketeers have been conditioned to chase (and by chasing it can’t ever hope to hit)!
First post, good vibes!
You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.
That’s brilliant, props to you!
Great idea! I haven’t seen any others mentioning this in all the protest discussions I saw. Hopefully others did similarly, that seems like something that could really help.
I don’t see social media companies do this, I see billboard companies do this. On billboards that stay “please advertise on our billboard” for years.
There’s a difference though as a billboard is a physical spot that they are actively losing money on when not filled vs a random spot in your feed.
It’s still a spot that could be used by an actual ad. Of course, they have millions of those spots
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.”
Somehow your comment reminded me of
C’mon now.
No reason to get personal
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/Caution_Last_Burgerville_for_24,800_Miles.jpg
On that note, how do you post images inline?
is how I’ve been doing it.Testing yours:
Hope that helps.
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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.
Sad, but I ain’t mad. This is the bed that Wish.com “Elon” made for Reddit
Great Value Elon!
Elon: 4 letters
Spez: 4 letters
Coincidence?
…
Almost definitely but still I love how comparing someone to Elon has become an insult so I’m having a good time anyway :3
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It’s really sad for me to see a social media platform like reddit crumble. I spent years there.
I spent more time at Reddit then I did in the K-12 education system. I have a lot of good memories and learned a lot from both, but I have no desire to return to either.
I worked there once upon a time. This whole thing has felt like seeing an old friend succumb to addiction and wind up derelict.
It’s sad, but hard to feel bad for doing it to himself.
It’s like meeting your ex who has now become a homeless meth-addict.
I will never feel sorry for advertisers or the people who work with them.
:^)
That’s exactly what I said elsewhere in the thread. This is billboard company behavior.
Wait… Reddit has ads?
Hats off, that’s both an argument for the use of third party apps and for eliminating third party apps at the same time…
Reddit gold ran the platform. Going for profit killed the API.
As all adblocking solutions, Yay from the user, Nay from the corporate.
We are just saving them money, imagine the amount of API calls for serving Ads to everyone /s
Buy an ad for Lemmy. Edit: I seem to have clicked the wrong reply location. I don’t feel like deleting it though.
As an ex-RiF user, and also desktop+uBlock, apparently yes.
I use libredirect in Firefox and Google Web cache for reddit if there’s only an answer I can find there
unfortunately. and they are just s bad as you think
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.
Just opened the official reddit app. Saw one post. And, no joke the second post was “promoted”
🥓 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.
We should all club together and get some ads for the fediverse on there.
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.
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.
Streisand effect. It would just increase the Lemmy advertisement.
Links could be shortened and wouldn’t show it points to Lemmy.
And give money to Reddit? Hell no. Let’s see how much time they take to refill those ad slots by themselves.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m in. Anyone got a catchy idea?
- 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.
Hmm. So how about: “Tired of ads? Reddit wants to show them to you. Come to Lemmy, we are friendly and you are welcome!” I am willing to commit 100 euro if anyone can make that happen.
Dude, don’t waste money on that. Wanna help? Donate it to your instance 😉.
You forgot to mention that Lemmy has cookies. Reddit only has stale, decade-old bread.
If you’re talking about tracking cookies, I’m sure Reddit has plenty of them.
I’ll do it if we get enough people to pitch in.
Number 2 is a work of art, bravo
Thanks! I don’t have the energy to but an ad, but I hereby grant these words to anyone to use for that purpose.
What’s wrong with a good old fashioned “fuck spez”?
*fuck u/spez
Pronouncing the u just makes it better
It would be funny to buy an ad that said that if it didn’t involve giving him money
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”
Is there anything stopping an instance from adding in their own ads?
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.
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.
Or they accept it as a way to pay for that instance. The servers aren’t free at the end of the day.
I’d have no issue with paying a small fee to have no ads tbh.
To a non profit or volunteer org, sure. To make spez rich, I’ll pass.
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”
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Perhaps, but I think the nature of Lemmy discourages the brute force aggressive ads that you can see elsewhere.
Compatibility of the ads with other software.
“Barbie”, only in theaters July 21st.
Your post made me think ads had already invaded. So, I hate you.
That’s not going to happen on Lemmy. It is technically possible but it’s very highly unlikely.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That seems like a pretty good argument for us all to join the patreon.
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.
Why did you pick that instance, out of curiosity?
E: Posted the same comment three times, looks like. Still getting used to this.
It’s cool. I do the same on Reddit.
I’m Finnish, so it felt like home.
Patreon seems like a good option.
Why did you pick that instance, out of curiosity?
Is there a way to aggregate instances?
I’m not sure what you mean?
Aggregate, as in collect those instances’ feeds and show them combined?
That’s what Lemmy does with the instances it federates with.No aggregate all feeds from all instances?
That would be too much for your feed, I think. And a certain amount of redundancy from communities with overlapping content.
Actually thats your All feed. You have a local feed for your local Instances communities and an All feed for All instances communities.
They just show the same thing for me. Also is anyone else having really bad performance using lemmy.world? Are they going to be able to keep up with this influx of users?
They just show the same thing for me. Also is anyone else having really bad performance using lemmy.world? Are they going to be able to keep up with this influx of users?
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I’d suspect viral advertising to be more likely/prevalent
I doubt that will happen, but when I am reading Lemmy threads I usually develop quite a thirst. To combat that, I drink Brawndo the thirst mutilator. It’s got electrolytes!
Brawndo, It’s what plants crave. ™️
That happens regardless.
Ha same here, it really is like being back on Reddit!
Made me instinctively downvote (do we still call it that?) before I finally realized what the post was really about XD
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.
I hope my username irks him continuously
Somebody on here snagged the username “spez” and that brings me great joy as well
Please do it 🤣
God they can’t even make the joke right.
Yea that’s honestly worse than begging for advertisers lol
An inclusive or joke without the or is amazing. They clearly do not understand their users at all if they can’t even get one of the most basic recurring jokes right.
It’s Hello Fellow Kids shit, for sure! A swing and a miss lol
Probably because it wasn’t made by an actual reddit user
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.
Having tried to use Reddit advertising for business (a national company), it really wasn’t very good. They had very poor targeting and algorithms.
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.
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
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.
Yup. That was our experience too! My boss and I were both Redditors and we thought it would be cool.
Narrator: It wasn’t.
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!
Can you post them? Name and shame.
You need to leak those emails, screw Reddit and u/spez.
Oof. That’s disgusting. Another reason to feel good moving here
Given how they screwed up new.reddit and can’t make a decent app, this doesn’t surprise me.
I took a pitch from a Reddit ad sales rep in May, and he admitted to not really using the site.
If you go to the URL in the ad and click on “get started,” you will see something interesting:
An 800 number.
What’s so interesting about the 800 number?
If enough people call it, it costs them money, for starters.
Time to fire up a Twilio bot?
Good point!
I guess using a phone-line for interact with a website is strange.
Fair enough.
That was scary. Thought Lemmy had ads already!!
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.
I’d rather we all pay a few bucks to not have lemmy get infested with ads.
Problem is that such isn’t a stable source of income.
Though I guess Wikipedia makes it work. So I dunno.
Yeah. I just surprised I thought reddit put ads on lemmy 😂
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.
I’m ok with ads if they’re not targeted or unethical/unpleasant
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.
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?
I’m ok with ads if they’re not targeted or unethical/unpleasant
I though I’ve had left… and then spez tracked me down. Scary stuff indeed.
I will leave the second it happens. Crazy.
Mmm, I get the ideological stance, but servers do cost money.
I suppose donations are an option but can’t imagine that being a stable source.
hi its me, Jimmy Wales I’m kindly requesting you to give $1.00 to lemmy
Please read: a personal appeal.
I though I’ve had left… and then spez tracked me down. Scary stuff indeed.
I though I’ve had left… and then spez tracked me down. Scary stuff indeed.
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?
Them: yes
Lemmy users: No
Which step is profit?
Underpants!
Ah fuck, back to the drawing board!
Even in their ads for ads they have to get their content from their user base
Watching all this happen in realtime is surreal…
Pretty wild, isn’t it? This is what it felt like when Digg v4 came out.
It’s digg all over again with a dash of tumblr.
