Reddit to contextualize conversations for advertisers with Spiketrap acquisition

Reddit right this moment introduced the acquisition of an viewers intelligence and contextualization firm known as Spiketrap. The phrases of the deal weren’t disclosed.

With greater than 100,000 lively communities and a variety of conversations, Reddit has turn into a preferred vacation spot for advertising. The corporate has been engaged on methods to assist companies attain related and leaned-in audiences, and now, as a part of the identical effort, it’s bringing Spiketrap’s know-how and folks beneath its umbrella. 

What does Spiketrap do?

Based in 2016 and headquartered in California, Spiketrap empowers manufacturers within the media and gaming industries with bespoke viewers intelligence and media instruments. 

Beneath the previous, the corporate makes use of synthetic intelligence (AI) to extract helpful alerts from a wealth of unstructured datasets and delivers viewers insights, social media insights, aggressive intelligence and influence measurement to advertisers. It provides unparalleled viewers readability and context, significantly inside high-velocity on-line environments, the corporate says. 

In the meantime, the media instruments function the follow-up providing, enabling corporations to behave on that readability and context to drive higher engagement.

Spiketrap has not shared the names of the purchasers it has labored with however the firm claims to have seen important demand in its goal industries. It additionally raised seed funding again in 2020 from a number of traders, together with Susa, 645, Pathbreaker and Anorak.

How this can be a nice deal for Reddit

With this deal, Reddit hopes to deliver Spiketrap’s contextual evaluation and engagement instruments, and the staff behind them, into its advert enterprise. As the corporate explains, the transfer will improve its capacity to focus on customers with advertisements primarily based on their conversations and pursuits on the platform, whereas additionally enhancing ad-quality scoring and engagement prediction fashions for auto bidding. 

This can in the end enhance advert relevance and efficiency on Reddit, driving greater return on funding and improved options for promoting manufacturers.

“We empower advertisers with the mandatory instruments to attach with related audiences and communities on Reddit. Spiketrap’s superior contextual NLP/ML [natural language processing/machine learning] know-how is a superb match for our platform as we transfer into the following part of our advertisements product technique and develop our advertiser choices,” a Reddit spokesperson advised VentureBeat. The staff from Spiketrap has already joined Reddit and can quickly begin supporting and spearheading tasks throughout the advert enterprise, the corporate famous.

Earlier strikes for Reddit’s advert enterprise

Whereas the choice to amass Spiketrap is sensible for Reddit, this isn’t the primary time the corporate has made an acquisition to spice up its promoting capabilities and drive higher engagement. Beforehand, it had acquired Spell, a SaaS-based (software-as-a-service) AI platform, to determine and classify contextual relevance of conversations and customise advert placements. One other notable acquisition was that of NLP firm MeaningCloud.

“We imagine focusing on related audiences primarily based on pursuits, and with the context of the conversations they’re partaking in, helps guarantee advertisers are reaching the fitting folks in probably the most environment friendly methods,” Shariq Rizvi, Reddit EVP of advertisements monetization, stated. “We’ve got been actively investing in options to this finish for a while and this acquisition will spherical out Reddit’s functionality, taking it to the following stage.”