Reddit began hosting video content on its own servers in August of 2017, allowing users to post video content on its various subreddits without having to rely on third-party video hosting websites.
In a blog post, Reddit has announced that it will be rolling out support for native video ads on all its supported platforms starting next week. However, for the time being, these ads will only appear in the expanded card display mode of Reddit’s new redesign.
Also, it’s important to note that these ads are – at the moment – limited to standalone ad campaigns, meaning that they will appear as individual posts, rather than play as pre-roll ads on other video content.
Reddit also shared a few stats regarding native video on its platform; on average, videos hosted on Reddit are now getting a total of 5 million minutes of views per day, jumping to about 100 million when content goes viral. Interestingly, posts using the native video player get twice as many views as those linking to YouTube, and now account for 20% of the content on a number of major subreddits such as r/oddlysatisfying, r/aww, and r/FortniteBR.
It’s quite clear that Reddit has been trying to turn its community-driven platform into a sustainable business. Zubair Jandali, Reddit’s VP of Brand Partnerships, told TechCrunch in a statement:
“Reddit has remarkable product-market fit on the consumer side and we’ve not layered a business on top of it. There aren’t a lot of opportunities that tend to come around like that.”
The video ad business is just one step closer to that goal, but only if these changes are accepted by the Reddit community with little friction.