They don’t have a meeting with Toyota and say “check out the community banner our users created”

They say “we launched a promo that lasted 48 hours (or w/e the fuck it is) and community engagement was through the roof. We had an increase of x% users during this time. The next time we will do this it will be $X amount for X amount of ad space so you can get in front of X amount of users”

I haven’t seen r/place but I bet there are 0 ads on that page. Reddit is smarter than to sell ad space next to FUCK SPEZ and My Little Pony Porn. What they will do is increase ad prices for the next “event”.

No matter what you think, this engagement is supporting them.

It’s really not. They do not give a shit about what it looks like. All they care about is clicks for ad revenue. They waited from 2017 to 2022 to re-do place, then they do it again a year later, directly after introducing a ton of unpopular changes?

Naw fam, this is 100% them generating traffic and anyone that keeps going to place is falling right into their hands, regardless of what message they think they’re sending.

The advertisers aren’t going to care about a banner. Reddit is going to tell them, “yeah there were some protests and a minor dropoff in traffic, but see how well we rebounded and even grew in July!”. Every single click on that thing counts as “traffic” and you can bet that that’s exactly how reddit is going to sell it.

Reddit wants to show investors that their site interaction hasn’t dropped since banning 3rd party apps.

A lot of the investors likely won’t ever see the place but will for sure get the numbers…