[shostack]

I've been in marketing and media for almost 20 years, been a Reddit user for almost that long, and have run teams owning both buy and sell side, including at a publisher platform.

My $.02 CPM is that yes, Reddit can improve their rates by improving relevancy. But they don't capture anywhere near the volume or quality of signals to inform relevancy models as compared to others in the space.

From their privacy policy it looks like they may engage with vendors who enrich data that can be tied back to a hashed identifier. This seems in sync with the increased pushes to create accounts with emails (one of the main identifiers the industry relies on) as well as use the app (to get a MAID, though those are increasingly worthless for identity resolution vendors from a match rate standpoint).

Reddit is in a tough spot because a huge chunk of their users want to use them anonymously, or with minimum PI provided. This leaves Reddit in a position of needing to either push harder to get it (like if they added profile fields to collect more PI), or infer it from modeling based on the subs you visit, content you read or post, interactions with other users, etc. Which puts them in the crosshairs of privacy bodies depending on how far they go.

This is all my own personal opinions and conjecture.

[SturgeonsLaw]

It speaks to their incompetence really, because when I look at the list of subs I have subscribed to and interacted with, my Reddit history is very, very closely aligned with my interests, much more so than any of my other social media profiles. If they can't mine that data effectively then they don't deserve to make money.

[toyg]

The problem mentioned by parent comment is that it basically ends there: they struggle to cross-reference your Reddit persona (faithful ad it may be) with the bucketloads of signals advertisers get from other sites.

If you talk about buying a car on some random app, chances are that you'll then see ads on Facebook about used cars. Facebook gets to know what you do elsewhere, and offers advertisers extremely precise (and hence more valuable) targeting. That's what Reddit can't do.

[disgruntledphd2]

They need a pixel/SDK to make that work. That should have been step 1 in relevancy. Seems like they could also gave used their sharing buttons but whoever is running their ads strategy may not be focused on the right things (i.e. Dr advertisers from adult and gaming to start with).

[HDThoreaun]

Reddit definitely has a pixel. They don't have a 3rd party ad product though like FB and google so why would sites add it?

[disgruntledphd2]

For conversion tracking is generally why people add these.

[ketzo]

This is really, really interesting, thank you for sharing. Taking with normal guy-on-the-Internet grain of salt, but you seem pretty informed.