Conversation Placement (Conversation Ads)

Conversation Placement is a Reddit advertising format, launched in September 2021, that inserts ads inside comment threads, positioned between a post and its first comment rather than in the feed. Reddit pitched it as a way to reach users at a high-engagement moment, including the large volume of visitors who arrive on a thread directly from a search engine, and the unit supports interest, community and custom-audience targeting along with negative-keyword exclusion.

The format arrived months after Reddit shut down programmatic advertising in April 2021, signalling the company's confidence in selling its inventory through direct and self-serve channels. It was beta-tested for roughly a year with more than six hundred advertisers, including HBO Max, Adobe and The Washington Post, before its wider release, and it launched in a quarter when Reddit's advertising revenue grew sharply. Conversation Placement matters because it embeds advertising directly into the unfiltered discussion that gives Reddit its value, which both maximises engagement and intensifies the brand-safety problem of ads landing beside controversial conversation; Reddit pairs the unit with keyword exclusions and third-party verification to manage that risk. The placement has since been extended deeper into comment threads.