Reddit to Turn Positive Posts Into Ads for Brands

The next time you recommend a product or service to someone in conversation on Reddit, it might turn into an advertisement for the company. A new feature announced by the social media site at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity will allow brands to take positive comments posted on Reddit and display them right under advertisements on the platform.

The feature, called Reddit Community Intelligence, will integrate conversations happening on Reddit into a company’s marketing efforts. So, for example, an advertisement for Lucid Motors might pull popular threads from users who have talked up their experience with the company’s cars. Those posts are curated by AI and displayed directly below the company’s ad spot. Reddit claims tests of the feature have led to a 19% higher clickthrough rate than standard ads.

Which…that’s cool, I guess, if you’re an advertiser. If you’re a user, you’re seeing ads take up a bit more screen space. And you’re potentially seeing your posts and conversations turned into free advertising for a company. Presumably, if you’re talking positively about a brand, you might not care if you see that turned into a marketing campaign. Social proofs certainly aren’t a new concept in marketing and are a cheap and easy way to establish credibility by tapping user feedback. Of course, it does not seem Reddit will be giving a cut of those conversions to the Redditors who made the posts in the first place, though one could argue their content is at least in part leading to more sales.

During a conversation with Axios on Monday, Reddit’s CEO, Steve Huffman, made the case that the feature is just taking advantage of what is already happening naturally on Reddit. “Half of the conversations on Reddit are basically commercial in nature,” he said. “It turns out within every hobby, within every passion, within all these travel decisions, you’re actually kind of deciding what to buy next.” A recent article from Marketing Brew highlighted that more and more users are searching Reddit for help making decisions, finding it to be more human and authentic than alternatives like Google search results. So Reddit is cashing in on the trend.

This is the latest in a massive monetization effort from Reddit, which would really like to prove it has a reliable model for growth and revenue now that it’s a publicly traded company. Earlier this year, the company’s CEO talked up a paywall feature for subreddits that would lock some exclusive content behind a subscription model, which Reddit would presumably skim a percentage off the top for facilitating the transaction.