This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Semrush
Paid users can download this list of top subreddits that accompanies this post
Last week, Reddit announced that it's going to put all of Reddit behind a login wall. I think this is the right call for Reddit, and I even suggested a version of it back in the summer, when I wrote that Reddit should stop feeding Google all its data.
[Sponsored by Semrush]
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The byproduct of this announcement is that the onslaught of spam that Reddit has faced over the last three years from companies trying to use Reddit activity to manipulate LLMs will no longer serve any purpose. Suddenly, all of those Reddit agencies that popped up overnight, and the long-term contracts to promote companies on Reddit, will lose their value. Many companies will abandon their Reddit activity and go back to ignoring the front page of the internet. That would be a huge mistake.
Reddit is a destination
Reddit is a social network just like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube, and the like. Brands and people get the most value by acting as community members and engaging with the community, whether through dedicated subreddits or by interacting with other users on the platform.
While Reddit can send massive amounts of traffic when a URL lands on the front page or at the top of a popular subreddit, it is so much more than that.
In practice, more often than not, the customer who complains about your product on Reddit is often not complaining on X or Facebook, which means Reddit may be the only place on the internet where that person is talking about you, and if nobody from your company is there to redirect the conversation, the complaint sits unanswered in front of every other customer who finds it.
When someone posts something negative, it can lead to pile-on from others complaining about the same thing. Check out these examples of hugely negative information about companies that goes unaddressed because the brands don’t participate on Reddit.
At the other end of the spectrum, browse these subreddits where employees or brand ambassadors actively engage. Negative statements don’t go unanswered, and many of these conversations are taken offline.
My journey through social media
I first came to Reddit because it could send enough traffic to take down a website, but I stayed for the community. Ironically, I became a Reddit user because of Google.
In 2011, the company I worked for was decimated by the Google Panda update. One morning, we lost over 60% of our traffic from Google, and as Panda rolled out, it rose to 80%. We had great content and a valuable site, but we also created useless programmatic pages across our network of sites that, in total quantity, dwarfed the volume of valuable pages.
We deserved Panda.
If you have read my book and followed me on social media, I credit Panda with being one of the greatest influences on my career. Panda taught me how not to do SEO, and as a result, I learned how to do SEO that aligned with what search engines sought. In addition to forcing me to pivot my SEO approaches, it also forced me to learn new marketing channels.
Most of the revenue that we earned at that company came from display advertising commitments. We needed to reach our previous page view count in order to earn the advertising revenue we had counted on. To make up for that monstrous loss of traffic, I learned how to run paid marketing at a low enough margin to profitably arbitrage into display advertising, and I also learned how to drive traffic from social media.
I dabbled with Twitter bots that amplified tweets from our editorial team, but they didn’t send much traffic. I then spent months figuring out what made things go viral on Digg (this used to be a huge social network), and I finally cracked the code.
There were three things that contributed to virality on Digg at the time: 1) Speed - a piece of content needed to be posted before anyone else did; 2) Copywriting - the title of the post needed to be primed for clickbait; 3) Network - everyone on Digg at the time was networked with other Digg users, and as soon as a link was posted, you would message your friends to give it a vote.
Through these efforts, I became a top submitter, and 45% of the URLs I posted hit Digg's front page. For my employer, that meant at least one front-page hit per day, and it helped restore much of our social media traffic.
But then I was banned from Digg.
While I worked to restore my account on Digg by reaching out to employees there, I found another place to submit my content: Reddit. Unlike Digg, Reddit only required copywriting. Using a network helped me get URLs to quickly climb to the top of a subreddit, but if the content wasn’t truly interesting, it quickly plummeted when it was no longer artificially supported. Much of the manipulation I relied on for Digg success wasn't needed on Reddit and was actually harmful to Reddit efforts.
Whereas on Digg all the top submitters were assumed to be on someone’s payroll, the usernames weren’t that interesting to the Digg users who just surfed the front page. On Reddit it was precisely the opposite. If you were assumed to be promoting a specific brand or site, your account could be outright banned or ghost banned (where you don’t realize you were banned).
To counter that, I had to become a real user with real user behavior. I still have a dozen dormant real Reddit accounts with thousands of karma. Users check profile histories to see if someone is real, with comment and submission history that looks like an Internet user rather than a marketer shilling for a brand.
You need to be, or at least pretend to be, real
And this is where Reddit is today. Many agencies selling Reddit services can fool their clients, but they can't fool real Reddit users. A cursory look at a human user's profile can detect that lack of authenticity and the signature of an AI user. This might have worked for LLMs (although I was always skeptical), but it will never work for becoming a community member.
Reddit's real value lies in participating, not just driving traffic or boosting LLM visibility. Brands that transparently advocate for themselves on Reddit can engage users in the social network where those users live.
This activity should be a dedicated function of the social media team, supported by the customer support team. Usernames should clearly show this is a company-managed account, and the team should own the logins.
If a company isn’t ready to make the leap to a company-managed advocacy channel, they can “pretend” to be more of a fan or ambassador of a brand, but that account still needs to be real. The last thing a company needs is to get called out for not being transparent about who they are because then all those efforts would be for naught.
Use an agency
Most companies aren't equipped to do the above, which is why I suggest they use agencies with Redditors on their payroll who know how to do this and have experience engaging with the Reddit community. (Reply to this email for intros.) When you vet an agency, ask to see the long-standing personal accounts of the people who would work on your brand. If they are aboveboard, they will have nothing to hide.
For the right brands, there's a ton of upside to being in this community. With Reddit now closing the door to LLM scraping, it is time to take a second look at Reddit as a social media channel and appreciate it for what it is.
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