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.
That's stage 3 enshitification for you.
Wow. What a fantastic read
Be sure to read the other blog post linked in that blog, too:
https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start
It's a rant from a veteran social media/blog writer from some of the earliest days of the internet.
It's a bit repetitive, occasionally overwrought, and very long, so feel free to skip some paragraphs, but if you've been around the net for a while, especially if you were here before Facebook, you'll recognize exactly what they're describing and know that anger.
That feels like 25 years of shit I've never been able to find the words to say.
Damn
I was looking for that article a couple of weeks ago, and for the life of me could not remember where I'd originally seen it. I didn't even notice it was there when digging this up. Amazing!
Going to bookmark that this time.
Thanks for sharing, I see what you mean about it feeling like something you have wanted to say.
A section I liked is
Lately I've been feeling a sense of dull but oddly optimistic sense of resignation about the fate of internet and privacy and all the AI bullshit, and I think this paragraph captures that feeling.
Woah, what? There are stages??? Do tell!