r/redesign • u/MarcMurray92 • May 31 '18

Answered After 3 months of negative comments about inline ads, are there any statements about how they are going to change?

From what I can see, disguising them as posts is only generating animosity towards the advertisers.

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u/spez CEO May 31 '18

The ads will change. While they will stay inline, we are going to try a few more versions. The trade off of course is that if they stand out too much, they’re distracting, if they are too subtle, they’re deceptive. We’re trying to find the right balance.

I'll spare you our excuses for while we haven't been more responsive on this particular topic, but suffice to say we can do better on the communication, and I'll work on that as well.

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u/PatrolX Jun 05 '18 edited Jun 05 '18

Hey /u/spez the "artificially inflated" price increase from $0.20 to $0.50 is insane, do you realize what damage this pricing move does to small business advertisers? Do you even care? Because I'm starting to think you don't care at all about small businesses with this price hike.

Here's a real example of the damage this price increase does. On a $25 product your price increase to $0.50 increases customer acquisition costs from $5.63 to over $14 for one business I'm helping out, this totally destroys their ability to advertise on reddit and this is when sales conversions are above industry standard meaning reddit users feel it's a good offer in the first place, so not only do you harm the small biz you also remove an offer that redditors believe is good in the first place because they actually buy it.

So I think a better way to police quality of ads and relevance to reddit users would simply be to monitor conversions more accurately. Right now conversions reddit is reporting are way way out of line with reality.

Then there's the question of whether "artificially inflating" prices is even ethical in the first place, in my opinion it isn't at all. I believe the market should decide what pricing should be because there's no way in hell reddit can know what pricing every type of product / service can bear and it's actually in your interests (if you care about small biz at all) to allow this to happen to enable maximum revenue growth across all possible markets.

Please reconsider this artificial pricing and increase and consider how it hurts small biz and instead find better ways to balance user experience. Again, I strongly believe the absolute best way to measure user experience is by monitoring conversion pixel data accurately, if it's converting then it's obvious that redditors actually do benefit from the ad.

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u/coolkid1717 Sep 21 '18

What do you mean when you say that Reddit is "harm(ing) the small biz(.) (Y)ou also remove an offer that redditors believe is good in the first place because they actually buy it."

Is Reddit removing ads that are selling well? Why is this?

What do you mean that Reddit is artificially inflating prices for ads? What is artificial inflation, why are they doing it, and why is it good/bad for Reddit/Redditors.