A few days ago, my second advertising campaign on Reddit finished. Like the first one, it involved a sponsored link which ran for three days at a total cost of $100. The ad can be seen here.

Unlike the first ad, which was randomly seeded all over reddit, this one was targeted at a specific subreddit, r/politics. I chose this one because it had a large subscriber base, with a higher-than-average interest in political issues.

Ideally I should have used the same ad text for comparison, but I used one that I had designed for use on feminist subreddits instead. This was a mistake, though not a major one.

The second effort resulted in 845,565 total ad impressions, compared to 582,454 for the previous one. I'll list the earlier numbers in parentheses.

There were a total of 1,607 (1,152) clickthroughs to /r/MensRights, amounting to a total of 0.19% (0.198%) of all impressions. The cost was 0.012 (0.017) cents per impression and 6.2 (8.7) cents per clickthrough.

The reception of this ad was a bit more controversial than the previous one, receiving a net vote score of -75 (35), and total comments of 330 (115) - almost exactly twice the response of the previous one. This is probably a result of the targeted audience having more of an activist streak.

Discussion in the thread was lively, with more substantive issues being covered than in the earlier ad's comments. Predictably, there were strong attacks by feminists, and an attempt to piggyback on the ad by posting links to feminist subreddits.

Overall, the second ad created more discussion, but probably didn't inspire as many new visitors as the last, I'm guessing, since more of the audience would already have been aware of the existence of our subreddit.

The experiment continues.