1 upvotes, 0 direct replies (showing 0)
View submission: Announcing Online Presence Indicators
Although I know reddit is trying desperately to do things that bring in money and keep the site running. So I do understand why they're doing this.
It's still super unclear to me how online status indicators translate into money. If they could clarify that I'd be able to understand the motivation better. But it seems like a really misguided attempt to drive "engagement" as a KPI regardless of whether it annoys users or actually results in engagement that drives revenue.
If you just assume you'll get more page loads as a result of some real time chats, and assume that you get to place one ad per page load -- there's no obvious reason that advertiser budgets will grow just because you increase page loads. It makes more sense that your advertiser pool would have basically the same budgets as they did last week, so revenue per pageload would drop proportionally to compensate. But you have more pageloads per user session, so your cost of operation rises with the artificial boost of engagement.
Like seriously, if reddit can coherently explain, "you get this website for free, and this is how this feature will make us more money" then I'd get it. But as far as I can tell it's just really misguided.
There's nothing here!