Dive Brief:
- Reddit made an internal decision to stop serving ads on the /r/conspiracy subreddit after a 28-year-old man armed with a rifle opened fire in the Washington D.C. pizzeria Comet Ping Pong last week, as reported by Ad Age. The man claimed he was making a personal investigation into "PizzaGate," a popular alt-right conspiracy promoted on the subreddit that claims Comet has long been used as a front for a pedophile ring that's connected to major figures in the Democratic Party.
- Ad platforms and publishers including Google, Facebook and now Reddit have all come under fire for earning revenue on ads appearing and supporting pages that promote false news items and hoaxes. False news sites have also come under increased scrutiny as their real-world consequences have become more tangible of late: First during the recent presidential race, when misinformation about candidates would go viral on platforms like Facebook, potentially swaying the results, and now with the real-world threat of violence via PizzaGate.
- Reddit was serving ads on /r/conspiracy as recently as Monday; the ads were sold programmatically through major ad exchanges. As of Tuesday, the subreddit is ad-free.
Dive Insight:
While many brands have long been averse to serving ads on illegitimate sites or through publishers who don't necessarily align with their values, they have also felt a lack of control over where their ads appear as programmatic buying has grown. Sensitivity toward these issues has spiked in the post-election period as political differences and the tangible consequences of supporting misinformation have become supercharged. One of the most buzzed instances of this was Kellogg's recent decision to cut off its ads to the alt-right news site Brietbart — a move which pushed the publisher to launch a boycott of Kellogg products.
Facebook, in particular, has come under fire for promoting fake news as trending topics, so much so that CEO Mark Zuckerberg had to make a series of public statements addressing how the tech company intended to fix the “problem.” Reddit operates differently than Facebook, supporting user-driven forums for discussion around certain hobbies or topics like movies and television shows, but its decision to drop ads on a conspiracy hub follows Facebook's decision to weed out bad news sites from its Audience ad network last month.
Reddit has made strides to be more marketer-friendly this year with the introduction of basic interest ad targeting in late October, despite having a historically ad-averse audience. Continued bad buzz surrounding the site's support of PizzaGate discussion — the conspiracy subreddit is still active despite not receiving ads — may throw a wrench in the site's plans toward better monetization going forward.