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Over the past two days, more than 8,000 Reddit communities have restricted user access, making it harder for people to view or contribute content to a particular community, while more are encouraging a boycott of the platform.
These actions are in protest of a new policy that will charge third-party apps for the use of Reddit’s previously free API.
And advertisers, who are paying to reach these eyeballs, have felt knock-on effects, leading to paused campaigns, redirected impressions, softer metrics and more scrutiny of the benefits of the platform.
“After the blackout, we will be closely monitoring user behavior on Reddit and guide clients when we can unpause,” said Freddy Dabaghi, managing director at Stagwell-backed Crispin Porter Bogusky, which has asked clients to pause, depending on their client goals.
Dabaghi notes this pause will be shorter than more prolonged advertiser boycotts on Twitter and Meta. Still, Reddit has been working on its relationships with advertisers, and any accumulated goodwill could be diminished if the precarious situation continues.
Redirection and soft metrics
Moderators are protesting a new Reddit policy, starting July 1, charging third-party apps to use its API. Some of these apps, which help moderators manage and grow their communities, have said they will have to shut down because these charges make running their businesses prohibitively expensive. Currently, these protests are impacting a small percentage of Reddit’s more than 100,000 active communities.
On Monday, Reddit’s ad manager encountered a brief outage, during which buyers were unable to look at reporting statistics, even while impressions were still delivering, though the impact was fairly minimal, per four sources. (The Verge reported the moderator blackout crashed the site, although it’s unclear whether the crashes are related).
Reddit told advertisers that it was redirecting impressions lost from these blacked-out subreddits to the home page, as there has been an overall spike in traffic to the platform, according to a media buyer who was not authorized to speak on the communication.
“By directing ads that would have gone to the blacked-out [moderated] pages to the homepage is kind of defeating the point,” said Liam Johnson, senior account director at Brainlabs, who hadn’t seen that particular note from Reddit. “The ads would then just be shown to the masses and outside of any of the contextually relevant locations that advertisers are trying to achieve with Reddit.”
