Reddit Steps Up Their Self-Service Advertising With Help From The Oatmeal

About a month or so ago I saw this post on TechCrunch (who just happens to be one of our awesome publishers) about how Reddit had revamped their self-service ad service. I say ‘revamped’ because Reddit has actually been running their own self-service advertising since back in December of 2009, but after a few months of letting it run they decided to make some improvements under the hood, which explains the TechCrunch write-up.

To be honest with you I’m not much of a Reddit reader myself, but I was definitely interested in the fact that they had decided to spend the time, effort and money to build their own, customized self-service advertising system. It was also cool to see that this time around when they made some updates to the system they used The Oatmeal (one of the craziest/funniest guys on the web) to whip up a cartoon to help explain it. Before you check it out, you should probably know that The Oatmeal didn’t exactly create what you would consider to be a standard FAQ or tutorial. You can take a look at it over here.

Although The Oatmeal doesn’t disappoint with his entertainingly educational guide on how to buy ads using Reddit’s newly renovated self-service system, there are a couple of real takeaways that I’d like to point out after looking over it.

1. Reddit decided to build their own, custom self-service advertising system, which shows that there is a high demand from publishers for these types of tools. Of course, not every publisher has the time, resources and motivation that it can take to build their own system, which is where we fit in. We can give publishers the tools to enable self-service advertising without the major investments needed to do it from scratch.
2. Keeping it simple can still pretty complicated. I’m not sure if you noticed or not, but The Oatmeal’s explanation of how to buy your own ads on Reddit is a fairly long 8-step process, which shows just how complicated these types of advertising systems can be — even when they’re meant to be simple. With most self-service advertisers we’ve found that the easier the process and the more simple the ad options, the better.
3. I now have a serious craving for a Big Gulp sized porkchop milkshake.

Thanks to The Oatmeal for the entertainment and if you’re a publisher and have ever thought about getting into the self-service advertising game be sure to give us a shout, we’d love to chat.

Tagged as: The Oatmeal