As a digital marketing channel, Reddit is often overlooked. But recently, the social news aggregator has quietly made strides to become a much more attractive advertising platform for brands.
Over the past year, Reddit has accomplished this by successfully ramping up its video content. In late 2017, the “front page of the internet” added a native video player and gave users the opportunity to record and upload their own videos.
Since the launch, video has thrived on the platform. Earlier this month, Reddit announced that it was now averaging 1 billion video views per month. According Marketing Land, it’s enjoyed a growth rate of 38 percent on native video since the beginning of the year. Marketing Land also noted that advertisers were seeing higher conversion rates and more engagement with video on Reddit as a result.
Reddit’s user base, which is reportedly 330 million monthly active users, has adopted quickly to sharing native video content. Digiday reported that Reddit users have shared a total of 996,000 videos on the platform. Digiday also stated that more than 400,000 hours of native video per day and 13 million hours per month have been served on Reddit this year alone.
The social aggregation platform has opted for a different approach to video ads compared to some of its competitors. In June, Reddit launched native autoplay video ads, which run within its content feed, as opposed to in-stream ads, which play pre or midroll. And rather than charging advertisers by CPM, Reddit has offered these videos on a cost per view basis.
An example of Reddit’s native video ads
Reddit believes that it’s delivering a viable product to advertisers. Here’s what it said about the performance of video ads in its corporate blog, per Marketing Land.
“Reddit’s beta video advertisers are seeing significant increases in key metrics such as brand favorability and purchase intent when compared with non-video ads. In fact, a recent study by Milward Brown indicates that Reddit Video is performing considerably better than industry averages for digital video advertising.”
A select few were picked in Reddit’s initial run of video ads. Major brands such as Audi, Nintendo and Netflix were among some of the advertisers in the first beta group. Reddit cited that one of its test advertisers “experienced a 5x lift in performance compared to Reddit campaign benchmarks” according to Marketing Land.
Reddit has approximately 138,000 active niche communities. Subreddits, as they’re known as on the platform, bring together anywhere from thousands to millions of people around specific topics. From Bitcoin to Shower Thoughts, users can find subreddits on just about any subject.
The clustering together of these niche audiences is what makes Reddit an attractive advertising opportunity. Brands seeking to target specific audiences can do so by advertising on subreddits relevant to their business. Zillow, for example, could likely do well running advertisements on a subreddit focused on real estate.
Video will continue to play a major role to draw advertisers and more users to Reddit. Only 10,000 of the 138,000 active communities on the platform are sharing and watching video on Reddit according to Digiday. If hitting a billion monthly views in its first year of native video is any indication, Reddit still has plenty of room to grow.
