There’s been a few people who commented this in the past, but as an advertiser on Reddit, I want to share the numbers I see.

First, there’s a few things to understand in the world of advertising:

  • Cost Per Impression - Usually shown as a cost per 1000 impressions, this is how much it costs to run a regular ad
  • Cost Per Click - This is a different type of ad where you only pay for who clicks. It’s also the reason sometimes you see really bad ads - They’re only paying per click, so they want the most gullible customers
  • Analytics - I can watch who comes to my website and what they do. I can actually watch a lot more info than that, but it’s all I need to run my businesses
  • Organic User - Someone who came to my website without an ad

PSA: If you’re not using uBlock Origin to block ads, please install it. Firefox - Chrome. Every other mainstream adblocker sells your data in some capacity, but uBlock Origin is open source.

Now, with those things in mind, I pay for Cost Per Click, and I target a more expensive user group. In the ad I’m about to show you (picked at random, but it’s within ±20% of most my ads), it costs me an average of $0.82 every time someone clicks my ad:

(Yes, it’s brutally expensive. If you really hate ads, install AdNauseam. You will cost advertising companies thousands of dollars.)

But okay that’s fine, because roughly 2,000 people went to my site, right? Lets see what they did when they went there

See - There’s something interesting about this, and it’s less apparent in other advertising networks. You see while Reddit charged me 1,600$ for 2,000 users, my own analytics show only 1,142 people came to my site in the same time window - and that number also includes my organic users, by the way.

So what happened to almost 50% of the users I paid for? Some people accuse Reddit of inflating the numbers, but that’s illegal, and there’s a much simpler explanation. Reddit’s PMs and are deliberately designing ad placement to maximize clicks (and get more money). What they don’t realize, is they’ve made everyone miss-click on ads, so both users and advertisers miss out.

In fact, that miss-clicking part is trivial to prove. Guess when I ran advertising campaigns on Reddit?

Anyways, that’s all for now. Reddit doesn’t only screw over their users, but their advertisers as well.

  • deweydecibel@lemmy.world
    2353·
    1 year ago

    PSA: If you’re not using uBlock Origin to block ads, please install it. Firefox - Chrome. Every other mainstream adblocker sells your data in some capacity, but uBlock Origin is open source.

    It’s not just about it being open source, it’s about the mentality of the people running it. The lead dev for uBlock Origins is hard line on ad blocking and privacy. He fundamentally believes in what they created. That’s the only person you want running something like that.

    And they tell users to use Firefox, by the way, because uBlock on Chromium has been handicapped. If you want the full uBlock experience, Firefox is the one and only browser to use it on.

    Edit: BTW if you ever want to cheer yourself up, take a look around the closed issues for uBlockOrigins on Git. Every now and again you come across some marketing company stooge stumbling in asking why some address is being blocked and asking for it to be whitelisted, only to get a hard no, then get flummoxed as if they don’t understand why. It’s beautiful.

    • ikidd@lemmy.world
      82·
      1 year ago

      The uBlock team has fought a constant war with advertisers and Chrome on our behalves. Mozilla has done it’s part as well. They deserve a lot of credit and respect for it. And support.

    • zzzzzz@lemmy.ml
      354·
      1 year ago

      It’s not just about it being open source, it’s about the mentality of the people running it.

      It’s about both. Because, if it isn’t open source, there is no wayit is substantially more difficult to verify that the people running it aren’t lying.

      • SK4nda1@lemmy.ml
        21·
        1 year ago

        They said “It’s not just about open source”, implying that its about both open source and about the mentality, just like you said.

    • Fenzik@lemmy.ml
      21·
      1 year ago

      I had a browse through the issues but I couldn’t find a good example - would love a link if someone finds one!

      • sudo@lemmy.fmhy.ml
        25·
        1 year ago

        https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/chromes-new-ad-blocker-limiting-extension-platform-will-launch-in-2023/

        Starting in June 2023 and Chrome 115, Google “may run experiments to turn off support for Manifest V2 extensions in all channels, including stable channel.” Also starting in June, the Chrome Web Store will stop accepting Manifest V2 extensions, and they’ll be hidden from view. In January 2024, Manifest V2 extensions will be removed from the store entirely.

        Google says Manifest V3 is “one of the most significant shifts in the extensions platform since it launched a decade ago.” The company claims that the more limited platform is meant to bring “enhancements in security, privacy, and performance.” Privacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) dispute this description and say that if Google really cared about the security of the extension store, it could just police the store more actively using actual humans instead of limiting the capabilities of all extensions.

        The big killer for ad block extensions comes from changes to the way network request modifications work. Google says that “rather than intercepting a request and modifying it procedurally, the extension asks Chrome to evaluate and modify requests on its behalf.” Chrome’s built-in solution forces ad blockers and privacy extensions to use the primitive solution of a raw list of blocked URLs rather than the dynamic filtering rules implemented by something like uBlock Origin. That list of URLs is limited to 30,000 entries, whereas a normal ad block extension can come with upward of 300,000 rules.

        • Galluf@lemmy.world
          6·
          1 year ago

          So it looks like most users aren’t seeing a handicap yet, but may start to see one in January if that block list size cap/updating the list is an issue.