With the amount of problems with major platforms for advertising online, looking for better alternatives makes sense. Recently we have been trying out advertising on Reddit again, to see if running ads on there is a good idea now. When setting up ads with their system, one thing that seems rather significant is that by default commenting on ads is disabled. Considering that discussion is a major part of Reddit, you might wonder why that is.
While we haven’t enabled commenting to see what happens, we got somewhat of an idea of what might happen, based on a contact form submission we received. The subject of the message was “You Dumb?” and the body read:
You Dumb? Seems like it. WTF you doing advertising Magento websites on Reddit and get a drop-off link a MS FrontPage 98 website?
Bitch, please.
Beyond the childish tone of the message (though likely from someone well into adulthood, considering the reference to MS FrontPage 98), the criticism leveled doesn’t make much sense. If you want to criticize the look of our website, fine, but we were not “advertising Magento websites”, but upgrading them. That is both clear in the ad and the landing page. The look of our website shouldn’t be all that relevant, since an upgrade shouldn’t change the look of a website. We would have pointed this out to whoever sent this, but they provided a bogus email address. Are there a lot of advertisers looking to reach people that are spending time doing something like that at 10pm on a weeknight? Probably not.
We have also received multiple messages from people clicking through our advertising on Reddit looking for services that were only tangentially related to what was being advertised and not related to anything we offer. Some of these messages were also not totally coherent.
If you are running advertising looking to take advantage of people, based on this, then Reddit might be a good option, but for legitimate advertisers it looks like a lot of who you could reach, wouldn’t be who you are interested in reaching.