Reddit Has Turned Into a Legitimate Audience Development Tool
By: Chris Sutcliffe
For years, Reddit was a low-priority platform for news publishers. If an article reached its ‘front page’—effectively the top of the feed for most users—audience teams would register a huge spike in traffic. But due to the fickle nature of Reddit’s audiences and algorithms, it was largely luck of the draw whether that would happen.
Social teams learned not to rely on Reddit for consistent traffic, instead seeing it as a rare but welcome jackpot.
Over the past five years, Reddit has been undergoing a transformation. Having excised some of the communities that were keeping it from being seen as a brand-safe environment, the platform undertook a charm offensive to entice brands into its ecosystem. It suggested that they launch their own subreddits (effectively a topic-specific message board) and, crucially, invested heavily in its sales teams. As a result, many are now advertising on the platform regularly, from tech companies like AMD and Ninja to banks like Santander and American Express.
The list of advertising partners includes a number of news publishers. The Guardian and the Financial Times both have ads running on the community-focused platform, as do local and regional titles including the UK’s Mill Media.
The uniting factor among these publishers is that they are primarily or in large part subscription and membership-based. So what is it about Reddit’s platform in particular that means publishers see it as a valuable place to advertise? To answer that, we should take a look at how they are using the ‘new’ Reddit.
Engagement and conversation
The platform itself has previously cited The Washington Post’s subreddit as an example of how news brands can use its tools and features effectively.
WaPo posting links to their stories regularly ensures that more people join the subreddit and that referral traffic is more consistent than it used to be. In December 2023, the paper had two team members focused on the platform.
So far, so standard. However, a publisher’s social teams cannot simply dip in and out of the platform scattering links given Reddit’s focus as a forum for discussion. The Washington Post’s Gene Park initially spearheaded the publisher’s presence on Reddit and made it absolutely clear that it should be seen as a place for community discussion instead of just a link dump. It’s no surprise that he has been active on the platform since 2011 and continues to regularly engage with users under the links to his own articles.
Other US-based outlets have also recognized that Reddit has undergone a transformation. The New York Times and Houston Chronicle have both experimented with providing paywall-free links to stories they feel will cause a lot of engagement on well-chosen subreddits. This is in order to have users brought into their ecosystem. In a lot of cases, the decision to bump select subreddit up the priority list for social teams has come at the expense of X, which until recently was often seen as the go-to social platform for engagement and discussion around stories.
That opportunity to engage directly with engaged communities—who are most likely to click through and ultimately convert—has previously been noted by some of the publishers who are now advertising directly on the platform. Three months ago, the Financial Times hosted an AMA (‘Ask Me Anything,’ a Q&A session) with their consumer editor Claer Barrett. Over the course of the session, users submitted over 335 comments around a range of topics as wide as financial literacy resources to opening an ISA.
Crucially, in the intro accompanying the post, Barrett linked out to both the FT’s main site—which is paywalled—and its free-to-access Money Clinic podcast. As Park had first advocated at the Washington Post, the AMA was primarily a community-focused forum and only secondly a pitch to convert readers.
Pippa MacNeil, the FT’s senior performance marketing manager, says: “The main purpose of these campaigns is very rarely to try and persuade the audience to buy an FT subscription on the spot. It’s more about engaging with people who might not think of the FT as being ‘for them’ and gently challenging those perceptions with unexpected (but on brand) content and experiences.”
So why are some news titles also advertising directly into the feed of users, if the focus for their activity on Reddit is on community building?
Investment and experiments
Alongside Reddit’s increased focus on moderation and brand safety ahead of its recent IPO, the platform has also been investing heavily in its adtech tools. It says that its “keyword and interest-based advertising targeting allows brands to reach users at crucial moments by highlighting products or services precisely when Redditors are researching options and seeking recommendations.”
If a user has previously engaged with news publishers’ content on the platform and therefore shown themselves to be a potential subscriber, Reddit is now allowing those publishers to follow up and keep the pipeline to conversion open.
Joshi Herman, founder of Mill Media, a North of England-based publisher that runs newsletter-based titles like the Manchester Mill, said of their advertising activity on Reddit, which began last month: “We’ve been meaning to try Reddit ads for ages and recently we finally got round to testing them. We get lots of organic referrals from Reddit because people link to our stories a lot there, so it feels like a natural route to try.”
He explains that the community-oriented nature of the platform is what makes it attractive for issue-based publishers: “The kind of people who read and pay for our journalism are particularly engaged in their city or local area, and if you’re in the local Reddit channel that might be a similar kind of person.
“For us, it’s all about getting more readers onto our free mailing lists, and then we hope that the quality of our journalism will convert some of them to paying for a sub.”
However, he notes that it is too early to say whether the experiment will be effective.
A spokesperson for the Guardian confirmed that they, too, are still in the early days of advertising on the platform. “The Guardian has recently begun advertising on Reddit to explore a new avenue for engaging with our readers and reaching a wider audience. This is a new channel that we are testing while we assess its effectiveness.”
And, while the FT is investing in its activity on Reddit as a result of the success it has seen in engagement on the platform, MacNeil explains that: “As for the impetus behind our first paid media campaign on Reddit back in March—our agency entered a Reddit competition on our behalf, we won, and we received a credit on our ads account.”
It seems that, at least for the moment, publishers are experimenting with Reddit’s advertising tools – which appear natively in users’ feeds – as an extension of their current engagement strategies across the platform. But what is absolutely certain is that, for news publishers seeking to discover new audiences, Reddit is looking like a good bet – or at least better than X.
