Calling them “free-form ads,” Reddit said the new advertisements are its most native format ever, designed to look and feel like community content shared by real people.
The ads, meant to mimic the site’s megathreads, will enable advertisers to utilize a variety of formats in one post, including images, videos, and text.
According to numbers from Reddit, free-form ads got 28% more clicks than all other types of ads on the site and saw a jump in community engagement.
The next time you see an interesting post in your Reddit feed, take a closer look - because it might just be a paid advertisement.
Let’s be honest here. Reddit had been astroturfed for over a decade, and a majority of posts that spoke favourably of products were ads.
The only value Reddit had in that regard is through Google surfacing the valuable discussions and content (e.g. the ones that weren’t the ads).
Reddit from the beginning had bot accounts to artificially inflate its number of users.