this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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Ad revenue is down (at least) 50% and they just keep making decisions that kick people off their platform.
I’m pretty sure Twitter advertising and Reddit advertising are in a race to the bottom to see who’s going to have to pay companies to put ads on their site first.
It’s insane to watch this happen. I remember watching the rise of Twitter as a kid and it becoming ubiquitous with social media, only to see it crash down this quickly.
I’m speculating, but I’d guess a lot of functionality is being limited because they don’t have dev staff to maintain it, as well as trying to cut server costs as much as possible. I’d honestly be surprised if musk was making these decisions because he thinks it’s good for the health of the platform. There has to be some ulterior motive for it.
It is unfathomable to me how Reddit isn't profitable.
Facebook makes a mint by telling advertisers, "trust us, we'll get your ads in front of people who might buy your product based on a lot of inference around their fairly generic profile data plus some tracking cookies". One guy should be able to sell a billion dollars worth of ads on Reddit. Just put up a form that says, "which subreddit do you want to advertise in?" and "what's your credit card number?". That's it. They have like 10,000 completely segmented markets just sitting there full of hundreds of millions of people who have self-selected to be members of those communities.
We spend hundreds of billions of dollars collectively trying to figure out which google search terms might find us a few more solid leads. Reddit has an amazing list of them for every company in the entire world. How in the everloving fuck have they managed to blindly bumble around for two decades without ever falling into the giant pile of money in front of them?
Yes, yes fucking exactly, how is it not an automatic gold mine!? This vexes me as well.