As Reddit continues to rise in popularity — and on SERPs — we have an idea for generating revenue.

Written by Brook Schaaf

I should confess I’m not much of a “Redditor.” Years ago, as Reddit was coming up in popularity, a friend of mine was giggling about it at a party, so I asked to see what this website was about. The subreddit he showed me turned out to be some string of random pictures and, unfortunately, the one on the screen was a rather unflattering picture of a man’s nether regions. As you might imagine, this didn’t exactly draw me back to the site. 

But it seems I might be the odd man out. Reddit has soared in popularity, even becoming something of a search engine in its own right — to the point that Google regularly indexes its results, which has caused traffic to surge, with predictable results. 

Earlier this month, Reddit released a keyword targeting feature. According to the MediaPost article, “Keyword Targeting places ads within specific conversations to drive an estimated 30% higher conversion volumes.” In other words, the site is becoming a text-based ad network within a walled garden. 

Reddit also has at least one harsh critic. In August, commenter-upon-affiliate-matters Lars Lofgren called out the “Sleazy World of Reddit Marketing,” citing a high-ranking page for standing desks that one or more moderators put affiliate links into. After he drew attention to them, the links were subsequently purged, though the post still ranked highly in Google two months later. Lofgren wrote, “Maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t a good idea to trust the top rankings in Google to UNPAID REDDIT MODS.”

May I suggest that affiliate might be turned from a problem into a solution? If a Reddit thread has commercial relevance, any moderator will be hard-pressed to remove affiliate links if all links are banned, in part because an external link can go to an affiliate site. 

Instead, Reddit could determine the commercial interest level of the page based on its own keyword targeting and by revenue generated from auto-wrapping links to merchants with affiliate links. Other links could be ignored or scrutinized depending on management’s objectives. 

Finally, the unpaid Reddit mods could even receive a revshare. YouTube has long practiced this and Meta announced $2 billion has been paid out to creators so far this year. Disclosures can easily be made and don’t seem to have slowed commerce content sites. Incentives would be aligned and value would be recognized. 

Just maybe don’t add links to pages with you-know-what kind of content.

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