By Reddit is probably the last bastion of the old web left. It is often a weirdly wonderful place filled with content posted by near-anonymous or pseudoanonymous users into groups around specific subjects humans are interested in. While it has its own issues (especially in regards to political misinformation and religious angst), Reddit offers a pretty great way to communicate directly towards potential customers interested in topics related to your industry through both organic posting/engagement and through Reddit advertising.
There is one fairly large downside though, and that is that Redditors tend to despise advertising but Reddit itself thives on advertisments ran across its thousands of communities. Unlike other social platforms such as YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook Reddit has also never offered users a way to make money from the advertisements themselves on the site and instead asks them to participate by moderating communities as volunteers.
“Yeah, I suppose that’s possible! I would hope that the user would be able to successfully appeal the ban.” – /u/c_jl, Reddit Advertising Staff
Moderators are tasked, as volunteers like most human involvement in digital tech, with keeping communities orderly and making the users of specific communities happy. In turn this helps Reddit itself by keeping engagements on the site/app growing which improves ad impressions, clicks, and of course revenue. The one thing Reddit moderators do not control is the advertisements shown inside of their specific community or ‘subreddit’. This can lead to a sticky issue where users of a community report an advertisement as being spam and the moderators then block the user from participating in that community.
For any brands or users on Reddit wanting to run ads, this presents a unique quandary and one that Reddit Admins (Advertising staff) have agreed could create a possibly bad scenario for an advertiser.
If your brand is participating in conversations on Reddit by commenting or posting content into subreddits AND that same brand runs advertisements, it is possible then that Reddit users will report your account for spamming and that the moderators of those subreddits will ban your account. While this has no impact on your advertisements running through a community, it will make it so your branded or user account is unable to participate in a subreddit. According to the rules of Reddit you cannot circumvent this ban by creating a new account to participate, if you are discovered to be doing so Reddit Admins will take even harsher actions such as shadowbanning your entire account; a process where your account is banned sitewide, you appear to be able to post content to subreddits, but your user profile is invisible to everyone but you and your content is immediately filed away as spam.
Reddit Advertising staffer /u/c_jl confirmed this probability earlier this year although they added that hopefully any bans or shadowbans would be successfully appealed. In my opinion being banned on Reddit, especially as an active spam fighting moderator, even for a few days or weeks is a worse case scenario.
Instead, you should create a branded user name SPECIFICALLY FOR ADVERTISING on Reddit. For example if you are Microsoft you might create the user name /u/Microsoft_Official or for Google you might use /u/ChooseGoogle.
Importantly this account should NEVER be used to make organic posts or engage with communities in any fashion or it may be deemed as a spammer by not only Reddit users but also possible Reddit’s volunteer moderators and Reddits staff themselves (at least temporarily). If you do use this account to make any organic posts or to engage with any community it should be a subreddit where you or someone in your company is the top moderator, preferably a branded subreddit.
It should be noted that while this might sound like it violates Reddit’s rules about creating a new account to circumvent a ban, this is exactly how Reddit’s internal sales team handles large advertising accounts for big brands. No where in any Reddit documentation is it ever mentioned that having a separate account for advertising on the site is bannable offense and even if you do get shadowbanned by Reddit’s staffers this would likely be a far easier thing to appear than to Reddit’s army of unpaid volunteer moderators who are already anti-advertising. We also have let Reddit know this our new guidance and while the response wasn’t a total endorsement, it was implied as you can see in the thread (below).
Here are a list of some branded user accounts that appear to be used largely for advertising only:
- Google – /user/google
- Swiffer – /user/Swiffer_Official
- Paramount+ – /user/ParamountPlus
- Coors – /user/CoorsBanquetBeer
- Microsoft Surface – /user/Microsoft_Surface
- Orkin – /user/OrkinPestControl
- MasterClass – /user/masterclass_official/
- SKYY Vodka – /user/SKYYVodkaUSA
- Volkswagen (USA) – /user/VWUSA
- Jefferson’s Bourbon – /user/JeffersonsBourbon
- Samsung Mobile (USA) – /user/SamsungMobileUS/
Notable exception: Pizza Hut has done a pretty great job at using Reddit over the past year by participating organically in related communities like “Random Acts of Pizza”. Using this account for advertising might be a better idea than using a new one just for ads, especially if they are targeting users of that community, though they still run the very real risk of being banned from future organic posting. – /user/PizzaHutOnReddit
Thread on /r/RedditAds
This article is based on a Reddit Ads post we made in January of 2021 and is based on our constant evaluation of the Reddit Advertising system. If you want a digital advertising agency that stays on top of Reddit Ads and keeps your performance moving up and to the right, contact us and lets talk about your needs.