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Reddit's Pitch for Sponsored Content Isn't Appealing to Anyone

Maybe reddit and its moderators should codify the idea that original content creators should be linked to most often.

Reddit, faced with an unappealing advertising system and the Silicon Valley-specific problem of being hella popular but still losing money, made its pitch to to let content creators post their own content directly to specific subreddits.

The problem with its latest pitch, however, is that it's still not appealing to anyone, really.

A post made last week by Reddit advertising administrator Kristine Smith, known on the site as KrispyKrackers, said that the site wants to make "a platform that can make reddit work for content creators," meaning it wants to let brands, news outlets, and presumably small business owners to post their own content—for a fee.

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People have been doing this forever, on their own, for free, and often sketchily. But it's strictly against reddit's rules to submit links that only come from your own website. People do it nonetheless, and it's gotten some content creators (most often news sites trying to get more traffic) in trouble.

Often, the posts are initially very well received because, well, content creators often create new things, and the internet likes new things. But the internet often doesn't like things that are blatantly self-promotional, hence reddit's rules about spamming.

That's where Friday's post from Smith comes in:

"For a very small fee, [content creators] will be able to tag submissions as 'self-promotional,'" she wrote. "Moderators can then deem the submission appropriate or not appropriate for their subreddit .. if rejected, it goes to spam."

The problems here are obvious but worth pointing out. The reddit community, as a general rule, is very anti-self promotional, assuming the content creator isn't say, a photographer or a DIY cabinet builder or something like that. (Those DIY cabinet builders have their own gripes: Namely, why would I pay to post pictures of my stuff if I'm not trying to make money off of it?)

While the rule against self promotion is just that, a rule, it's just a suggestion that submitters find the 'original source of content'

Others have already argued that this rule inherently discourages original content, and I'd tend to agree with them. But popping a self-promotional tag on a news outlet's piece isn't going to change reddit's now entrenched dislike of self-promoters. This stuff is going to get downvoted into oblivion once it's tagged with a "self promotional" scarlet letter—unless reddit reworks how they appear in its feed, which would cause its own chaos.

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Secondly: Why would content creators pay for something if there's the chance that a moderator is just going to pop it into spam anyway?

Today's discovery: Reddit Sucks. No attribution. Hates original content creators. Community of holier-than-thou assholes. Anonymous dicks.

— Joe Aimonetti (@ammojoe) August 13, 2012

Reddit drives so much traffic to news sites (the "content creators" who would presumably want some sort of permission to post their own stuff on the site) that it's hard to blame them for wanting to post their own scoops on the site.

Right now, the only real, above-board way of doing that is by becoming a full blown redditor—the kind who is trawling the internet for news stories to post all over the site, from all over the web—and sprinkling your own content in from time to time. Maybe that's how it should be.

Maybe news organizations should employ people to simply post to reddit all day—I suspect someone has already experimented with this, but that's not a newsroom position I'm readily aware of.

There's another fundamental flaw with reddit that's driving content creators (and I mean this in very strict terms—news outlets that do original reporting, not aggregating) to want to post their own stories: Their stories are getting jacked, constantly, and other people reap the benefits of it.

While the rule against self promotion is just that, a rule,  the suggestion that submitters find the "original source of content" is also just that, a suggestion (part of reddiquette, technically).

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"Often, a blog will reference another blog, which references another, and so on with everyone displaying ads along the way," is the stated reddiquette. "Dig through those references and submit a link to the creator, who actually deserves the traffic."

In practice, this happens rarely.

In a recent blog post, Brandon Mendelson, author of Social Media Is Bullshit, explained the problem.

"Within the #2 and #3 most popular subreddits, it is often impossible to identify the original source of the content," he wrote. "Reddit is still a site fueled very much be stealing and repurposing other people's stuff."

Scrolling through popular subreddits such as news, worldnews, technology, and futurology, you'll find aggregated story after aggregated story. This also happens in nonjournalistic pursuits on reddit, as well.

A good example of this happened back in February, when Glenn Greenwald's Edward Snowden scoops were banned from /r/news and /r/worldnews, while a truly bozo rewrite on examiner.com reaped reddit's attention and eyeballs.

It happens even when there isn't a ban in place. Top /r/technology, politics, and news stories from the last several months are often two paragraph rewrites of blockbuster reports broken by other news outlets.

Under that lens, if you're a news outlet that has written something that's going to play well on reddit, it's enticing to get your own story out there, before someone else's version of it gets posted.

Reddit says it wants to provide content creators a way of doing that. But how is it going to work?