By Reddit’s new advertising format, Promoted Posts, is launching on Thursday August 4th and it looks really neat. The ads allow a website owner / brand to track links from their website or brand mentions shared on Reddit and promote them via the advertising system. If you’re familiar with Reddit you know that Redditors are sharing content and stories about brands and products all of the time.
This new advertising feature will help brands highlight those conversations and interactions with consumers.
In Reddit’s own words from their announcement:
In conversations with many advertisers, we often hear that Redditors have already rallied around brands and products they genuinely like, and advertisers want to know how they can be part of that. But at the same time, we want to ensure that our communities remain free and user-controlled.
We asked if this ad format would make it’s way into the self-serve system, where most advertisers purchase ads. The answer was there were no current plans to do this, but that it could be something they look into in the future.
Right now we are offering this to big brands. This may translate over to self-serve in the future but no current plans. – MyNameIzKhan (Reddit Ads Staff)
This means that to do a promoted post, at least for now, you’ll have to be a big brand or be willing to spend at least whatever the minimum ad buy is for their managed campaigns. That’s unfortunate as many smaller companies, or even those that simply enjoy managing ads on their own, could see really good value in this new advertising format. Hopefully an iteration of this makes it way into the self-serve system soon.