Today I noticed that Buzzfeed has started taking out ads on Reddit, advertising click-bait sounding quizzes like those I spent so much time banishing from my Facebook feed. With this and Reddit’s recent development of allowing users to write “posts” on their user profile (i.e. status updates of their own), and their hosting of content such as images and videos; I am concerned that Reddit could be becoming more and more like Facebook.
Buzzfeed has started advertising click-bait low-effort, low-value quizzes on Reddit
The user account, Buzzfeedpartner, doesn’t have any post history so at the least it’s not Buzzfeed posting quizzes all over Reddit and has confined them to the advertisements section. Buzzfeed articles do get submitted to Reddit at a rate of about 10-30 times per day according to their domain submission history.
The user account also sounds like it might have been created by Reddit’s in-house ad sales team. This is the team that works to secure placements from much larger brands like the Google Pixel Phone campaign, and the Toyota TV Reddit Ads campaign, among the countless other campaigns from companies like Microsoft, A&E, HP, HBO, and others.
If that’s the case then congrats to the ad team for landing the publisher as an advertiser and thank you Buzzfeed for taking out ads on Reddit and helping fund the site’s ongoing growth and development. But could you not?
Buzzfeed isn’t all terrible, they have some good, long-form, well written content. Why not engage with Redditors in a way that feels more like Reddit with your ads? And less like, well, you treating the users on reddit like a bunch of pre-teens flipping through Cosmopolitan magazine.
Please don’t Buzzfeed my Reddit.
This article is part of the Stuffing series, Opinion articles that are based on and about Reddit Ads and the Reddit website designed to inspire conversations about the platform. These do not reflect the opinions of Reddit Inc, other authors on this blog, or Winner Winner Chicken Dinner the parent company of this blog; and are not exactly useful in your own Reddit advertising campaigns. They are just opinions, if you have your own opinion about the topics brought up in this article please leave a comment below or take the article to your favorite subreddit and discuss it there.