bold_panda

My thoughts:

Subscription boxes are hard. I sold mine.

It's hard to keep subscribers happy every month, especially with food.

Most profitable subscription boxes are profitable because they are run by savvy internet marketers & capitalize on novelty, trends, & gifting, not because the products deliver incredible value to the customer.

I think Proactiv is the only subscription box service that's stood the test of time without having to drastically change their business model and they have historically been extremely savvy with their marketing.

If you look at the landscape of subscription boxes, it suggests that for longterm growth & profit:

1. Curation doesn't work.

2. You have to make / manufacture / private label your own stuff (Dollar Shave Club & Proactiv)

3. You should raise money, use that money to sell your first million boxes at a loss, grow rapidly and try to race towards an exit.

4. If your product doesn't solve a major problem (acne sucks, razors are too expensive etc), you are probably doomed over long term (10-20 year horizon), so it's best to sell in year 3-5.

Thank you for shedding light on this. I suspected this was what was happening. They are letting the big advertisers empty their wallets.

Yes, I love this idea. Thank you for putting it more succinctly than I could have.

So you made this change to benefit advertisers not Reddit? That's hard to believe.

CPMs should have gone down, not up, since your inventory was expanded meaning same demand for expanded supply. Y'all should also have reduced the minimum allowed bid down from 0.20 since you were expanding your inventory artificially w/ a coding change.

You should have also expected that CPAs for your advertisers were going to go way down once you removed the ad from it's intended context.

Either the logic driving the changes was weak or your explanation is lacking the whole truth.

I see a business in Reddit who wasn't pleasing it's investors and did something hasty to increase revenue.

There was no official communication of the subreddit targeting change to existing advertisers.

Subreddit does not mean that it only shows in that subreddit. That's the problem I outlined in my OP.

Their is no interest category for jerky specifically and Reddit certainly wouldn't be that proactive as to adjust my ad for me in my experience. It's an automated system...which is fine...but they swept this targeting change under the rug.

I sent them a long email w/ all my suggestions for improving their platform. My current opinion of Reddit is that they DGAF about their advertisers.