[joshklein]

You're not wrong by any means, but it's also a question of scale and purchasing power. There's no doubt that r/parenting is filled with people worth talking to about, say, baby products. But then look at the advertising sales minisite for Babycenter.com[1]; a company like Johnson & Johnson isn't going to bother with r/parenting. Smaller companies might be interested, but small companies don't spend much money on ads. When they do, they mostly spend it on Adwords.

Of course the joke here is that J&J bought Babycenter. If I were a category-specific CPG company, I'd cut out the publisher middleman, too.

Ad networks & exchanges lead us to think there's a perfectly efficient & liquid market for ad space, but there's a real scaling problem for big advertisers that leads them to stick with big publishers. Quality control on r/parenting would be a concern.

[1] http://www.babycentersolutions.com/

[BrandonM]

> a company like Johnson & Johnson isn't going to bother with r/parenting

This is false. My girlfriend works in social media at a Fortune 100 company. Just a few of their many products are geared toward babies and other things of interest to parents. She attends "mommy blogger" conferences, reaches out to people on Twitter and Facebook, and otherwise works with people who have a substantial audience in order to advertise with them.

Big companies are much more likely than small companies to even have such a role. They are very interested in promoting themselves and increasing their profits in any way possible. There's absolutely no reason they wouldn't be interested in something like r/parenting

[jonknee]

> This is false. My girlfriend works in social media at a Fortune 100 company. Just a few of their many products are geared toward babies and other things of interest to parents. She attends "mommy blogger" conferences, reaches out to people on Twitter and Facebook, and otherwise works with people who have a substantial audience in order to advertise with them.

By bother he meant spend a bunch of cash, not @reply to people on Twitter. They can hire your girlfriend to submit stuff and comment on reddit all day, but that doesn't give reddit any revenue.

[BrandonM]

You apparently missed the part where I said, "and otherwise works with people who have a substantial audience in order to advertise with them."

My girlfriend doesn't work the spammer role that you seem to be envisioning. Her job is to discover an audience that is actually interested in the products her company offers and to reach out to them. Part of that job is to manage the Facebook presence for products that have well over 100,000 followers. Another part, as I said, is to find relevant blogs and other websites frequented by visitors of an appropriate demographic as a platform for their ad campaigns.

I brought real information to this thread. There was no reason whatsoever for you to shit on that.

[rat]

Paying someone to reply to people on twitter cost 20000 + benefits per person. Not to mention conference tickets, transportation to conferences. Maybe some facebook ads?

[jonknee]

It could be cheaper, but I'd never see a Facebook ad or Promoted Tweet. Sometimes the warm body making personal contact is what it takes.