2023 was not a great year for Reddit. After announcing sudden changes (e.g., a massive price hike and a new set of rules) to its once-free API, technology required by the many thousands of subreddits, things got tense. In what many have come to refer to as the APIcalypse, hoards of subreddits went dark in a coordinated blackout—and some closed their r/'s for good.
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Eight months later, Reddit, reportedly preparing its IPO, looks to be working to clear the air with a new set of free tools. Interestingly, it's not users or subreddit moderators who are getting a box of chocolates and an apology note — it's brands.
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Reddit Pro is billed as a "new toolkit for business growth," which the company wrote is the next step in its focus on building advertising solutions that channel Reddit's community-driven conversations. The new tools reportedly extend beyond traditional advertising and help brands grow an organic presence on the platform and leverage Reddit's interest-based communities to "understand, inform, and engage authentically online."

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Currently in beta, Reddit Pro includes an interface with multiple tools: AI-powered insights on Reddit topics and content, performance analytics, publishing tools for drafting and scheduling posts, and a dashboard for tracking activity. Reddit Pro users can also boost posts as paid advertisements. The announcement lists brands like Taco Bell, Wendy's, and The Wall Street Journal as early beta users.

Reddit Pro follows the Elon-ifying of Twitter (now X), a platform where verified brands must now pay $1,000 a month for verification and access to a selection of features (campaign measurement and dashboards run through a separate ads account). Over at Meta, ad pricing for brands has been on a yearly rise — and changes to its algorithm and targeting options haven't made things necessarily easier for reaching consumers.
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While some claim social media is dead, and policymakers in Washington are debating banning TikTok, these platforms continue to throw anything and everything at the wall to remain profitable and retain users.
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While toolkits like Reddit Pro might help your brand run ads and get a better sense of what users are talking about, it’s likely not going to reinvent the wheel for how you can genuinely access and understand consumers — especially across multiple platforms, environments, communities, and evolving products.
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Consumer insights and targeting capabilities on a platform like Reddit Pro are, like most social media platforms, completely closed to the platform — a “walled garden” where the technology provider has complete control over the hardware, applications, content, and data that resides within the walls of its product.

In these walled gardens, data is segmented; it can be lost, manipulated, or made more expensive by the ones calling the shots. This reality makes the ability to engage consumers on a platform a slippery slope. While Reddit Pro is reportedly free, it’s still meant to keep brands locked in to the platform's rules and limitations.

This level of segmented data, limited access, and limited innovation is not possible with web3.
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When using web3 tools to reach consumers, brands gain access to a whole new world of opportunities:

• Gain insights into customer activity and behavior across both online and real-world touchpoints.
• Leverage new analytics by connecting data from wallet signatures and onchain activity to build richer profiles and segment audiences more effectively.
• Transparent onchain insights so your brand can power leaderboards to gamify engagement.
• Engage communities of users that can take their attention, loyalty, and data easily across different platforms and applications.

NFTs are the new cookies, wrote Matthew Iles — and they are disrupting the archaic frameworks and technologies that traditional platforms use to power “AdTech, CRM (customer relationship management), CDP (customer data platforms), analytics and our entire relationship with what will soon be obsolete practices around leveraging data.”
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Stay tuned for a deeper dive into how web3’s borderless onchain data enables brands to connect to consumers in ways you can’t find anywhere else.

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