In recent years, Reddit has continually put efforts into strengthening its ad targeting and optimization capabilities, this time with the acquisition of audience contextualization company Spiketrap. Though the specifics of the deal are not disclosed, Reddit has said that Spiketrap’s AI-powered contextual analysis and tools would assist Reddit in areas such as ad quality scoring and will enhance prediction models for enabling auto-bidding. In other words, this acquisition will assist Reddit in better understanding its graph and matching relevant ads, resulting in improved ad results.
Reddit wants to make it simpler for advertisers to target relevant audiences based on interests; therefore, the agreement represents the company’s expanding commitment to its advertising business. The acquisition continues Reddit’s record of purchasing AI-powered businesses like MeaningCloud in July and Spell in June. The MeaningCloud platform is a natural language processing platform that enables developers to create apps that can extract meaning from written information, such as text on Reddit’s forums. Spell is a SaaS AI platform that enables technology teams to construct and execute machine learning algorithm experiments at scale.
In today’s millennials and Gen-Z-dominated internet culture, people often use emoticons, incomplete sentences, memes, inside jokes, and other unstructured languages when conversing with one another. Hence, measuring how people engage with online content using simple statistics based on what they click, see, or vote for is crucial and challenging.
The contextual analysis offers more profound insights than can be obtained from simply quantitative statistics of the number of engagements or link clicks. For instance, by utilizing metrics like audience sentiment, impact ratio, and conversation trends, the data collected from a campaign by Spiketrap’s proprietary AI, Clair AI, may provide an advertiser with a bit more insight about not only how but why people are talking about a campaign.
Clair AI is renowned for its potential to glean operational insights from unstructured data instantly. Reddit will be able to track popular articles in real-time using the Clair AI system, which will then map those stories against online community engagement to more accurately map information flows.Â
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Another Spiketrap product called Emotion AI can identify the tone of a message, such as enthusiasm, sarcasm, or toxicity. Reddit has struggled with toxicity over the years, frequently having to ban harassing and nasty subreddits as well as those that advertisers would want to avoid.
Spiketrap is a California-based company that was established in 2016 and provides specialized audience analytics and media solutions to businesses in the gaming and media sectors.
Reddit reports that the Spiketrap team has joined the organization and will lead several initiatives in the future for its advertisements business. Reddit is presently concentrating on fusing Spiketrap’s tools, technology, and resources with Reddit; as part of this transition, the company emphasizes, a plan for its commercial operation will be included.
