Fan communities can be powerful, but they come with particular challenges around official status and advertising. Bringing a fan community closer to its subject matter can provide boosted access for those fans. And that can be more appealing for leagues and advertisers, especially if some rougher edges of the fan discussion get sanded down along the way.
But if discussion at a community gets too official or too sanitized, many are just going to find a new community for that discussion. So there’s a balance to be had, especially when it comes to leagues engaging fan communities. And that’s going to be particularly interesting to watch around Reddit’s recently-announced sports partnerships with the NFL, the NBA, MLB, the PGA Tour, and NASCAR. Here’s more on that from the site’s announcement Monday:
Every day, we are focused on making Reddit the best platform for people to engage with communities of shared interests. We do this by delivering new ways for people and businesses to enjoy and contribute to conversations on Reddit. Today, we are excited to announce a partnership program to enhance the fan experience on Reddit. This program taps major sports leagues and aims to bring more of the content that fans love to Reddit’s passionate communities while also creating opportunities for advertisers to align with this content via video ads, AMAs, and other formats.
The major sports leagues are some of our most engaged Reddit Pro users and best-in-class examples of the power of engagement within Reddit communities. In addition, sports are one of Reddit’s most popular and fastest-growing (at +26% YOY) interest groups, bringing together highly engaged fans across over 1000 communities. It’s therefore not surprising that our first program partners include some of the biggest US sports leagues that have global audiences: the National Football League (NFL), the National Basketball Association (NBA), Major League Baseball (MLB), the PGA TOUR, and National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR).
We believe these new partnerships can enhance our community experience with content that fans want while enabling advertisers to align with expanded fan content on Reddit. Through our official partnerships with the NFL, NBA, MLB, PGA TOUR, and NASCAR, redditors will gain access to video highlights from games and tournaments, player AMAs, behind-the-scenes videos, and more special content posted by the leagues throughout their seasons and including during major events like Super Bowl and NBA All-Star.
…“Reddit is the go-to destination for sports fans around the world because it’s the place where they can dive deeper than anywhere else, and connect with other fans beyond the season and throughout the year,” said Reddit’s Chief Operating Officer, Jen Wong. “The country’s major sports leagues see the opportunity to reach global audiences on Reddit. We’re continuing to build more ways for businesses and organizations to engage with Reddit’s communities; this benefits our communities, program partners, and advertisers.”
There are some elements of this that can absolutely work for fans. For example, more athlete AMAs (Ask Me Anythings, a popular Reddit feature with subject matter experts in a variety of fields) sound appealing, especially if the players lean into the fan engagement, fun, and humor that often make Reddit communities stand out. There have been lots of these with athletes, broadcasters, and more in the past, and they’re often interesting and entertaining, so having more of those isn’t bad. (But if AMAs turn into more standard press conferences, though, that’s less interesting and unique.)
Increased access to video highlights also sounds potentially cool, as do behind-the-scenes videos. And if the leagues do work to make the AMAs and behind-the-scenes videos unique to Reddit, and lean into what works there, parts of this could benefit the leagues, fans, and Reddit as a company. Reddit can make money off the ads here, and while the leagues won’t necessarily be gaining more fans (subreddits on a league seem likely to mostly appeal to its existing fans), they may gain engagement from fans they already have. And it’s hard to generally quibble about more content; even if the new content isn’t a user’s particular thing, they can skip it to get back to what they like, right?
Well, that’s the question here. And the discussion of advertising here is particularly notable on that front. That Reddit release goes on to talk about that in more detail, saying “Reddit advertisers can align their brands to these communities and content experiences just like Samsung, Ford, Volkswagen of America and several others did as part of our initial test with the NFL during the 2023-24 season,” and talking about the rise an alcoholic beverage brand saw in purchase intent, brand favorability, and awareness by “activating alongside premium video content from the NFL.” And nothing there is inherently bad.
But brands usually care about where their advertising winds up and what it’s next to. In particular, that led to large waves of media companies ending or suspending X/Twitter advertising campaigns last fall around their ads running near antisemitic content, with some also changing their X content strategy around that. (For what it’s worth, the NFL expressed concerns , but did not join the ad suspension or withdrawal.) Many of the content shifts there were short-lived, but many of the ad shifts have been longer-lasting, which is part of why the ads on that platform are so low-quality these days.
How does that relate to Reddit? Well, advertisers’ desire to have their ads around positive and non-controversial content can come into conflict with fans looking for interesting conversations. And the same can apply for leagues and their own content, which is really an attempt to advertise their own product. And none of that’s necessarily about obviously-terrible content; Reddit’s rules and moderation approach actually reduce a lot of that relative to platforms like X. But what a league wants, what an advertiser wants, and what a fan wants are not necessarily aligned, and if Reddit goes too far towards the first two, there’s a risk of losing what’s made their platform actually appealing to fans.
Along those lines, it’s worth considering what Reddit is doing here in light of their overall approach. And part of that is “Reddit Pro,” “a free suite of tools for businesses to also establish and grow a meaningful organic presence on Reddit.” They unveiled that in March , and it’s mentioned in the main release on these new sports partnerships. And that March release talked up the NFL’s involvement in the beta of it. Here are some quotes from that:
At the heart of this evolution is driving the most relevant and valuable experience for our users, as they discover new interests, seek recommendations, and get the information they need from our communities. We believe that businesses and organizations have a role to play in Reddit’s ecosystem, and Reddit Pro helps add value to their contributions.
“In my experience moderating several large communities on Reddit, I’ve observed the learning curve when it comes to generating a positive response from your audience – it involves creating genuine and meaningful conversation, not just posting content. The tools being made available with Reddit Pro significantly expedite that understanding,” said moderator of r/NFL and r/Texans, Max Randa (u/440k). “Reddit hosts some of the largest and most engaged communities you will find online, and it’s hard to understand just how special that can be until you really get involved at the heart of it.”
Nothing there is inherently wrong. Providing businesses free tools (they spell out analytics tools, publishing dashboards, and more) to post on Reddit isn’t bad, and the approach here comes with at least some level of getting businesses familiar with the platform, which should make their posts more congruous than you might find otherwise. And it’s not like there’s a particular limit of content that can exist on Reddit; adding posts from the likes of the NFL doesn’t specifically delete any other post. But this new content does have the potential to diminish existing content in some ways, including with sorting and attention.
To discuss that in more than just generalities, let’s take a look at the r/NFL subreddit for a second. As of 10 a.m. ET on Tuesday, the default “hot” sorting of that subreddit for this user produced a Weekend Wrapup free talk thread, a thread on AFC East division predictions (part of a wider user prediction initiative), a thread discussing an Adam Schefter tweet on Haason Reddick’s contract situation, a thread discussing a Pro Football Talk article on a Derrick Henry quote, and then the NFL account itself posting a highlight video on Steven Jackson around his 41st birthday. In the next 11 posts, there were two more from the official NFL account, a Hard Knocks clip and a 1991 highlight. In that span, there were two ads as separate posts, one an Apple video and one a hair growth product display ad, in addition to the pre-roll ads on those clips.
None of that’s necessarily terrible. There’s nothing particularly objectionable about those official NFL posts, and they haven’t taken over the entire page. And, given the way the NFL sometimes restricts embedding of its clips and highlights, there’s some value for fans in a partnership that allows for some actual videos like this to show up. And the ad load here isn’t overwhelming, and there’s nothing particularly obvious for these advertisers to be concerned about. And ads are good for Reddit’s bottom line, and are the key part of its business, with the company reporting in a February SEC filing that “Ninety-eight percent of Reddit’s 2023 revenue of $804 million came from its ads business.”
But it’s worth keeping in mind that r/NFL started as a place for fans to discuss the NFL. Like many conversations, the tone of that discussion is likely to change when the subject’s in the room. And it may change on a few fronts. For one, the brand itself talking takes away attention from fans’ own posts, as discussed above. They’re joining a conversation that was about them and trying to fit in to an environment that was not initially for them, and that can be awkward.
But beyond that, there’s the potential for fans to self-censor with the league around. And more concerning still would be if the league tries to actively censor fans, or if Reddit steps up censorship there to keep its new league partner happy. The active censorship in particular hasn’t seemed to show up yet, but it’s certainly something to keep an eye out with any league partnership like this.
There’s going to be an interesting balancing act to watch here. League partnerships are far from inherently bad for discussion platforms; indeed, many of the X/Twitter ones over the years have worked out well (although there are more challenges there after that platform axed its sports staff), as have some with the likes of Instagram. But it takes a soft touch to make this work, and to have it actually add value for fans. And if a league partnership winds up being too detrimental to a platform’s initial raison d’être, a lot of people are just going to move on to another platform.
[ Reddit ]
The post Reddit sports partnerships could boost engagement and ads but risk fan alienation appeared first on Awful Announcing .
Most Popular
Comments / 0