The IT Nerd

It’s been a bad few days for a variety of companies such as Bell Canada who’s Internet offering wend down twice in a week, and Garmin who had an outage yesterday. Now it’s Reddit’s turn:

As usual, there’s been nothing from the company on this acknowledging the outage or when things will be back online. So I guess Reddit users will just have to wait this one out.

UPDATE: It seems that whatever happened was brief and things are back online again.

There’s some news from Reddit today. The company announced the availability of new profile tools to help businesses build their presence and connect with Reddit’s 100,000+ communities via Reddit Pro, a free suite of tools designed to support businesses of all sizes with organic engagement on the platform.

These enhancements will allow businesses to:

• Set up their profiles more quickly by generating suggested bio descriptions when they sign up for Reddit Pro
• Crosspost relevant community posts and comments about their products and services directly from the Reddit Pro trends tab to their profiles.

You can learn more about these new features and Reddit Pro on Reddit for Business.

This week Reddit announced Reddit’s Official Partner Badging Program that offers their agency partners exclusive badges for completing Reddit Ads Formula certifications. Agency partners like Tinuiti and GroupM are investing in deepening their knowledge of Reddit ads, and SMBs increasing their spend by an average of 88% within 2 months after completing the certification.

You can find the full blog post here with all the details. 

Reddit who is currently at Cannes unveiled their latest research into changing search behaviors, particularly among Gen Z, via a panel discussion with industry experts from Kraft Heinz, EMARKETER and Brandwatch. 

The research explores how Gen Z is leading the charge towards curated recommendations and personalized shopping experiences, and the role of crowd-sourced advice from community-verified information in the way people discover, share, engage with, and take action on content. 

You can have a look at their blog post for more information including links to the full research reports.

Reddit is at Cannes this week. And they announced via a blog post the following:

To this end, we’re thrilled to kick off Day 1 at Cannes by announcing a full revision of ads on the conversation page, our fastest-growing ads surface, and where 47% of Reddit screenviews happen (2). With redesigned creative featuring larger, more premium media, advertisers can appear where users are researching or discussing the topics they care about. We have also commenced testing on an all-new ad placement that lives seamlessly between individual comments in Reddit conversations. It’s specifically designed to reach audiences right at the moment they are most leaned in and primed to take action. Under the new name “Conversation Ads,” advertisers will also benefit from new brand safety controls, including specific ML tooling to further enhance confidence, coming later this year.

Here’s what these ads will look like:

The blog post has a lot more detail that is worth reading if you’re an advertiser looking to engage with Reddit users.

Reddit’s announced that they’ve appointed Jyoti Vaidee as their new VP of Ads Product. Jyoti was previously the Director of Product Management at Google where she spent 11 years leading ads products like Google’s Display Ads and monetization efforts. In this new role, Jyoti will drive ads product strategy, execution, and management of the Ads Product organization.

You can read more about this appointment here.

Reddit just announced their newest ads product offering: Dynamic Product Ads (DPA). This new ad product will enable advertisers to promote relevant products in conversations where redditors are already deeply researching, discussing, and deciding what to buy. Dynamic Product Ads provided 1.9x higher ROAS when compared to Conversion objective campaigns for the advertisers who participated in testing.

You can read more about this news in their blog post here.

Reddit has launched free-form ads, a unique-to-Reddit ad format with a “free form” layout that empowers advertisers to share in-depth information and maximize community engagement. It’s their most native format yet, which means it’s designed to look and feel similar to the ways Reddit users engage with each other on the platform. 

In early testing with brands like Philadelphia cream cheese Canada and Starbucks Canada, they’ve seen free-form ads outperform all other ad types in average click-through rate (CTR) by 28%, as well as increased community engagement when comments are enabled. 

You can have a look at their blog post for more information.

There is news out from Reddit where they have introduced major updates to a set of its advertising solutions: Reddit Ads Formula, its on-demand learning hub for advertisers; and Reddit Ads Manager. 

With the rapidly evolving advertising landscape, staying ahead of the curve is essential. This is why Reddit is introducing a new “Boost 2.0 Certification program,” designed to educate advertisers on everything they need to drive maximum success on Reddit. 

To make campaign management and execution more efficient, Reddit has also introduced a suite of new tools for ad managers including improved community search, campaign lifetime budget, and inline editing, among others.

Reddit Ads Manager Updates

New updates to Reddit’s Ads Manager: taking the guesswork out of community targeting on Reddit 

Reddit is continuing to invest in making the Reddit Ads Manager a best-in-class destination, and are leaning into tools and features that optimize their industry-leading contextual and interest-based advertising advantage, for all types of clients. They’re therefore pleased to announce their latest updates that allow advertisers to be even more strategic, seamless and effective in their Reddit campaign management and execution, all while tapping what makes Reddit unique.

Live now, these new tools will benefit Reddit’s small business advertisers all the way through to their enterprise clients, and are particularly geared at those looking to drive efficiency and performance on Reddit with just a few clicks.

Making it even easier to find your audience in Reddit communities 

Throughout this year Reddit has rolled out a series of features, like Keyword Suggestions, that take the guesswork out of driving successful campaigns on Reddit. Aimed at helping advertisers tap into what makes Reddit unique – our 100,000+ interest-led, discussion-rich communities – their latest Ads Manager features allow advertisers to more easily find their audience, expand their targeting, and better understand the Reddit communities most relevant to them. They include: 

• Improved Community Search: in addition to searching specific communities by name, Reddit’s Ads Manager now allows advertisers to also search for relevant communities by topic – particularly helpful for those finding their initial audience on Reddit.
• Targeting Suggestions: understanding that Reddit users are passionate about a wide range of passions and interests, this new feature serves up a list of additional suggested communities based off of an advertiser’s selected community target, helping them broaden their reach even further. 
• Community Info: They’ve also added community descriptions, topic tags, estimated audience size based on membership and engagement, as well as a link to the community, to give advertisers access to all of the key details in one easy place as they set their campaign parameters. 

In addition to these new features, They’ve also invested in new administration tools to allow for more seamless campaign optimization and oversight:

• Campaign lifetime budget: this new option in the campaign creation process allows advertisers to cap campaign spend at a predetermined amount. Once the submitted budget has been reached, all ad groups within the campaign will stop spending to ensure easy budget management.
• Inline editing: They’ve also made it simpler to edit campaign names, bids, and budgets directly within our Ads Manager. These changes can all be made in one place, within the Ads dashboard. 

More details on today’s Reddit Ads Formula announcement are available here. 

Fredrick “Flee” Lee has been announced as Reddit’s new Chief Information Security Officer, reporting to CTO Chris Slowe. Flee has over 20 years of experience leading global information security and privacy efforts at major financial services companies and technology startups, including as Chief Security Officer at Square and most recently as Chief Security Officer and Head of IT at Gusto. Flee will oversee the Privacy and Security teams at Reddit responsible for identifying and mitigating risks and challenges around information security, privacy, and compliance. 

The security of Reddit platform and Reddit continues to be one of their core trust pillars, and over the past several years, they have continued to bolster their Safety and Security efforts, expanding teams focused on these areas and reinforcing existing measures that protect the platform. As part of their commitment to transparency with their users, they launched a new Transparency Center on RedditInc.com and regularly share their practices, updates, and findings with their community, including in r/redditsecurity. These efforts are central to Reddit’s goals of bringing community and belonging to users around the world. 

Flee is a proud Southerner, raised in Mississippi, and holds a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from the University of Oklahoma. In his spare time, Flee enjoys rock climbing, snowboarding, mountain biking, road cycling, and powerlifting, and is a passionate Redditor, lurking in r/MMA, r/Awwducational, r/selfhosted, and r/netsec.