Best Sellers
Winter
Express Delivery
Made in the UK
Colour Match
Recycled Items
Christmas
New Products
Share
Tweet
Share
Share
Share
Email
We're always browsing the internet and news outlets looking for interesting and relevant news to share with Total Merchandise followers. Recently we've seen a lot of news about online advertising, from the use of social media platforms such as Reddit to concerns about the number of people using adblocking plugins. That's why today's blog is all about advertising your business online.
Source: TheKarenD, Flickr.Reddit Advertising
If you haven't heard of Reddit before, it's a social media platform which is a fair bit smaller than the leaders, Facebook and Twitter. The idea is to share links, images and text content within various groups for different hobbies, interests or locations.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and many other social networks have hosted advertising for years with little kickback from their communities. That's because business pages can be liked or disliked depending on whether you find them interesting or not, and paid ads are easy to spot and don't interfere with the user's experience much. Reddit works a little differently however, spammy posts in your favourite communities (or subreddits) can't be unfollowed - you have to unsubscribe from the whole community, meaning you lose out on information that you want to see! Furthermore, adverts are merged into your feed with a small "Sponsored" icon - making it hard to spot an advert from a regular post.
Reddit has a fairly vocal community, meaning if an advertiser tries to blend in with regular users to push their product they're often called out and ridiculed - making this a scary place for advertisers.
The news comes with the people behind the site working on advertising and metrics software to improve the site for advertisers and hopefully improve revenue for the platform.
Ad Blockers
Across the world, there are estimated to be over 200 million ad blocker users. That means that they don't see adverts on web pages, which sounds great until you find that this costs content publishers and other websites upwards of $22 billion each year. Some of your favourite websites may be forced to close down if too many people use ad blockers and therefore they don't receive ad revenue!
On the other hand many claim that the high use of ad blockers is the advertising industry's fault. If advertisements weren't misleading, annoying, or in the way then many would not feel the need to use an ad blocker.
