Typically love @benthompson and @stratechery stuff, but one thing yesterday's Reddit article gets very wrong is that Reddit's ads products are mostly contextual advertising and that Reddit has done well because of Facebook's struggles with Apple ATT. They are not, and this is not why Reddit has done well. The vast majority of Reddit ads are behavioral, not contextual (e.g. you engaged with a post from the bowling subreddit at some point so here are some bowling ads). Furthermore, the reason that Reddit has done well is not because Apple ATT killed Meta's ability to behaviorally target. What ATT killed was Meta's ability to "close the loop" on conversions, thus enabling them to better understand which user would convert from what ad, and from there better serve targeted ads. This is not what Reddit excels at anyway, and in-fact is the antithesis of Reddit's whole ads business (and Snap's, and X's, at least historically). Reddit/Snap/X are mostly brand advertising businesses (which is partly why X's advertiser boycotts hurt them so badly, performance advertisers don't get scared of bad press and run usually). Apple ATT is completely irrelevant to brand ad serving because the ads are typically getting served based on demographic or behavioral data ONLY, and not based on if they are going to convert (which is the whole thing that Apple ATT messes with). Reddit has mostly done well because it has graduated over time from test budgets within the Big 5 ad agencies, to real budgets. For the uninitiated, the Big 5 ad agencies make up something like 80%+ of total annualized US ad spend. They mostly *do not care* about direct conversions. They care about things like brand lift studies or video views, which are immune to Apple ATT as they are "conversions" that can be measured on-site anyways.
@jamiequint @benthompson @stratechery Reddit's targeting is contextual; it would be behavioral if the company targeted users based on their Subreddit interaction history (eg. getting a camping ad in a non-camping Subreddit). Ads on Reddit can only be targeted to Subreddits, though. The S-1 goes into detail on this:
@jamiequint @benthompson @stratechery know many brands that have tried advertising on Reddit it and it's total garbage. Little to no conversions. They say that it's a brand advertising play but I don't buy it ...It's just a waste of money. Facebook and Google are still 10, 000x more bang for any advertising dollars.
@jamiequint How does it then target then logged-out users?