I would be very interested in this if Reddit were chock to the brim of positive, technically disinclined females who enjoy commercial messages and spend money on software.

CTRs do not make advertising successful. Conversions make advertising successful. Your users, when they're in Reddit mode, "consume" links at a prodigious rate and are primarily engaged in interaction with Reddit rather than interaction with the links. Conversions from them are, for most businesses, going to be too low to measure. On the other hand, conversions from AdWords are fairly predictable, because if you're doing it right you are guaranteed to be speaking to someone who wants what you're selling.

Advertising is not a magic "pennies fall from heaven" game -- at the end of the day, somebody actually has to buy something. When you cultivate an audience of rapidly anti-commercial poor adolescents, you end up with the only remaining advertisers being the sort of autoplay flash infection vectors, because scams are the only business model that works profitably.

These are all great points. However, I just want to point out that reddit has had sponsored links for 10 months now, and our advertisers have been quite pleased with their conversion rates. We've also run some of our own ads in there, and had fantastic conversion.

You might not be able to sell bingo cards, but I bet you could push a lot of Neverending Story DVDs and pedobear t-shirts.

>only females buy stuff?

He's talking about the teachers that are his customers, I think.

The "technologically disinclined females" are his market, but the "pay money for software" one stings no matter who you sell to.

I assumed he was referring to the target customers for his bingo card creator app, making the point that Reddit ads are only useful to people looking to reach redditors, which is a very narrow segment of the population.

1. He didn't say that men were worthless, just less interesting.

2. Women are responsible for 80% of discretionary spending decisions (http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/feb2005/nf200502...), so if you're arbitrarily refusing to target them, you're wasting lots of money.

Yes, I'm sure you can come up with examples of men making spending decisions. But marketing-by-anecdote is not as effective as marketing-by-data.

By the way, if any of you want in on the beta, mention either YCombinator or Hacker News in your email to betaparty@reddit.com and we'll put you on the top of the beta list.

I like the open bid, split the pie approach. I suspect that it will go spectacularly wrong at least a few times before it converges on an optimal ruleset.

But I'm glad that reddit is continuing to innovate.

This is a good idea. I expect that reddit will make a lot of money from it.