Zero Clicks #4: Reddit eats more of the world

Every week in Zero Clicks, we explore the interplay of AI, media, and commerce.

If you felt a certain balance in the Force this week, chalk it up to Google bringing some normalcy back to the media ecosystem with the August Core Update. While it’s still early, many left-for-dead indie media and affiliate websites have surged back to life.

While it’s nice to see high-quality indies resurrected, the biggest winner of the Google update is once again Reddit. If advertisers weren’t paying attention before, they have to now.

The problem is… Reddit Ads, to put it kindly, is nascent at best.

Several years into Reddit’s paid offering, the overall quality of most ads on the platform ranges from poor to abysmal. On r/skincareaddiction, one of the crown jewels of the platform’s subreddits, I was served generic static banner or video UGC ads for Vital Proteins and Hims, two of the most aggressive mass advertisers in all of CPG. While some basic audience overlay here is likely impacting what I see (i.e. I’m a 32-year-old man), the more important variable is that I’m deep into a skincare rabbit hole when I’m on this sub. Either Reddit just doesn’t have relevant advertisers to show me, or the targeting is just shoddy.

There are some ways for brands to intelligently engage with Reddit today – Nick Andrews has a great podcast where he lays out strategies for slowly building brand karma on the platform and ways to engage in some smart promo code sharing. But it all feels far more “at the margin” than even what brands are doing with second-tier networks like Snap and Pinterest.  A true search ads business is likely coming, but Reddit has been very tight-lipped about what that will look like.

For this reason, I doubt that Reddit today is an existentially important organic or paid channel for a single prominent brand – something that feels bound to change soon. If ever there was a time to test Reddit, it’s now. The company hasn’t meaningfully repriced its ad inventory since getting a massive influx of net new traffic, and every other advertiser on the platform seems to suck at it. At worst, there’s definitely some arbitrage opportunity there.

BTW, to hear more from Nick about the rise of communities like Reddit for marketers and publishers, sign up for Martech Record’s Sept. 4 webinar.

That said, the important macro question is whether Reddit’s traffic surge is sustainable. Will Google’s bromance with Reddit persist, or will we eventually see a reversion to the mean with Google dialing back the exposure of Reddit forums in favor of more perceived expert, high-domain authority sources? Here, I’d consider whether Google as an institution is culturally closer to Reddit or legacy media like the New York Times.

Of course, Google showed its hand somewhat in striking a $60M deal with Reddit to train its AI models on Reddit data. Core updates that continued to boost Reddit, even as they rolled back other changes to search that hurt publishers, were likely inevitable.

There is, of course, some delicious irony in Google’s sudden Reddit embrace. Reddit is essentially a throwback to the entropy that ruled the early days of the web… before Google came along. Google became a $2 trillion enterprise by essentially centralizing, taming, and sterilizing digital anarchy to make the internet a product that normal, everyday consumers could use. Frenetic forums were relegated to obscurity in favor of a far more accessible interface.

Deep down somewhere in the annals of Google – in the basement that hasn’t been McKinseyfied – I venture there’s a longing to bring more of the degenerate Reddit ethos back to the internet writ large. Reddit, with its vast army of unpaid mods, is content in the form that Silicon Valley most loves – free and without gatekeepers.

Director of Strategic Partnerships, Semafor

While I generally try to take a “view from nowhere” type approach to sharing these jobs, this one is a little different. The hiring manager for this and several other openings at Semafor is my former boss, Bennett Richardson, who is the best in the media business. Also at a $160-200K base salary (and likely a ~$300K OTE), this is an incredibly lucrative media sales gig with an exceptional team. Please reply to this email if you are interested and I’ll put you in touch with the right people.

A little candid criticism for Semafor though – both a senior director of live journalism role on Semafor’s website and deputy editor currently pays less than the BASE salary for this job. While commonplace in media, making the content creators second-class citizens on the pay scale doesn’t exactly strike me as the best way to run a content business. As a former media salesperson, I posit that journalists should always make more.

Business Development Lead, Duolingo

Duolingo is just doing cool stuff across the board. From opening up a pop-up store to vowing to make its mascot “as famous as Pikachu,” to a host of licensing deals, the company feels ready to cross the chasm into a true mainstream brand.

Broader distribution partnerships will be essential as they do so, and this role sits right at the heart of that as one of the most interesting BD gigs in tech.