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Lessons from Building and Scaling Reddit's Ad Serving Platform with Go

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Re: Lessons from Building and Scaling Reddit's Ad Serving Platform with Go

#81

Post by jamiequint »

supernovae wrote: post #64
jamiequint wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey bflesch, a year ago we weren’t even running our own ad server and had just released an early v1 of our new ads management interface. It probably felt like the “worst ad management experience [you] have ever witnessed” because the other major ad management platforms have multiple years and hundreds of engineers/designers on us :) We’ve made substantial progress since then, I’d encourage you to not judge us too ear…

If you work in the ad group, my advice is to fix the ad approval process. I've never had such a disappointing experience in my life. Seems like the approvers have editorial control based on personal preference over any objective evaluation. Since reddit is all about the ebs and flows of whats hot and whats not, sure is a shame your advertising platform is a joke at monetizing that because of the terrible approval pro…

Thanks for the feedback! We are completely revamping the approval process over the next few months so I am expecting substantial improvement in this area.

Re: Lessons from Building and Scaling Reddit's Ad Serving Platform with Go

#82

Post by kadendogthing »

supernovae wrote: post #63
grey-area wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were already using a third party service. It was slow and opaque, so they ditched it. At the scale of reddit, and because this is how they make their money , this is clearly something they want in house and something it would be a competitive advantage to control, if nothing else it gives them a much clearer conduit to their advertisers, and much greater control over things like ad selection.

The problem with Reddit ads isn't their tech, it's their people. The ad approval process is a farce - and human-managed. Oh, and those humans are assholes. You have to go through many denials - for no reason - submit a ticket to get another approver and approved - for no reason stated. It was the most upsetting process I've ever dealt with.

This is a pretty emotionally driven comment and would do well to provide some sort of concrete story behind why the ad approval process is a farce and why this particular group of individuals happens to be full of assholes?

Re: Lessons from Building and Scaling Reddit's Ad Serving Platform with Go

#83

Post by ChrisSD »

ckdarby wrote: post #30
katzgrau wrote: post #13

As the founder of a SAAS ad serving company, I can say that as slick as (I think) my platform is, it's not a problem I would want to tackle again. There will be a large volume of technical challenges and required features to support. It'd be like writing Apache or Nginx from scratch. It seems simple on the surface and then you wake up to all kinds of inconvenient and unexpected technical challenges. I'm not sure Redd…

It seems biased. I had a similar situation with a client of mine. They went out looked at 3rd party companies, and everything looked decent on paper. Internally there were some napkin math and found out while the 3rd parties would save development time the returns of implementing features their customers were asking for now instead of waiting for 3rd party company paid for them to hire 3x the engineering staff the 3r…

Out of interest, how did those option compare with the napkin maths for paying a 3rd party company to include the needed features in their product?

Re: Lessons from Building and Scaling Reddit's Ad Serving Platform with Go

#84

Post by HyperTalk2 »

Ads on reddit are incredibly deceptive. I'm not sure why advertisers tolerate it. 98% of the ad clicks on mobile are surely fraudulent through being intentionally accidental. The ads are designed to look exactly the same as real posts at a glance, with a username, post date, upvote/downvote arrows, deceptive title meant to make it look like a real post, comment section, share link, and image thumbnail. Reddit users are all conditioned to believe that they can tap a thumbnail and be shown a larger preview while staying on the site. On these ads, it takes them to the advertiser's site instead.

https://i.imgur.com/Vm68wLP.jpg

Re: Lessons from Building and Scaling Reddit's Ad Serving Platform with Go

#85

Post by oblio »

jjoonathan wrote: post #65
somethingroma wrote: post #7

Cool. Maybe these guys should get in touch with the redesign guys and get them fired. Also fire any executive that thought it was a good idea. Because all the hard work to serve ads more efficiently goes to waste when the site is a mess and unusable.

The redesign is terrible for usability, but it does one thing very, very well: punish you for using an adblocker (sorry, "software blocker," lol). There are a few other dark patterns hidden in there too, all coincidentally pushing in a direction that's good for reddit. I suspect that's the real purpose of the redesign and that all complaints will fall on deaf ears until someone actually manages to disrupt reddit.

How does it punish you for blocking ads? Honest question.

Re: Lessons from Building and Scaling Reddit's Ad Serving Platform with Go

#86

Post by bduerst »

HyperTalk2 wrote: post #84

Ads on reddit are incredibly deceptive. I'm not sure why advertisers tolerate it. 98% of the ad clicks on mobile are surely fraudulent through being intentionally accidental. The ads are designed to look exactly the same as real posts at a glance, with a username, post date, upvote/downvote arrows, deceptive title meant to make it look like a real post, comment section, share link, and image thumbnail. Reddit users a…

Have you actually run ads on reddit, or are you saying this as a user?

If so, what stats have seen (impressions, clicks, conversions, etc.) for your ads?

Re: Lessons from Building and Scaling Reddit's Ad Serving Platform with Go

#87

Post by jedberg »

zeveb wrote: post #78
yourbandsucks wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the QA process that yields us precocious-looking stock photo 'MIT grads' trying to sell me a wine subscription on every other pageload?

reddit has ads? I hadn't noticed … More-pertinently, I wonder how many of the developers of reddit's new ad system themselves have ad blockers installed. Do any of them actually see the results of their work?

FWIW, when I worked at reddit, I never ran an ad blocker. In fact, I didn't run one for about five years after, until my CPU started spiking on just about every web page I visited.

But even then, I whitelisted reddit.

So my guess is yes, they see the output of their work.

Re: Lessons from Building and Scaling Reddit's Ad Serving Platform with Go

#88

Post by [deleted] »

ufo wrote: post #17
pjc50 wrote: post #9

A means for rapidly selecting and loading an advert which will then be blocked by the users' browser. (Although even without adblock, are there actually all that many overt ads on Reddit, other than the sidebar ad which nearly always is an ad for a different subreddit?)

There are also promoted posts intermingled with user generated content. They are specially visible in the mobile app

[deleted]

Re: Lessons from Building and Scaling Reddit's Ad Serving Platform with Go

#89

Post by barbecue_sauce »

HyperTalk2 wrote: post #84

Ads on reddit are incredibly deceptive. I'm not sure why advertisers tolerate it. 98% of the ad clicks on mobile are surely fraudulent through being intentionally accidental. The ads are designed to look exactly the same as real posts at a glance, with a username, post date, upvote/downvote arrows, deceptive title meant to make it look like a real post, comment section, share link, and image thumbnail. Reddit users a…

* locked comment section

Re: Lessons from Building and Scaling Reddit's Ad Serving Platform with Go

#90

Post by bitwize »

HyperTalk2 wrote: post #84

Ads on reddit are incredibly deceptive. I'm not sure why advertisers tolerate it. 98% of the ad clicks on mobile are surely fraudulent through being intentionally accidental. The ads are designed to look exactly the same as real posts at a glance, with a username, post date, upvote/downvote arrows, deceptive title meant to make it look like a real post, comment section, share link, and image thumbnail. Reddit users a…

Reddit has become the Something Awful forums without an entry fee. What did you expect? How else are advertisers supposed to capture that millennial and post-millennial dollar through a platform like that?
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