Is Anything Real?

[00:05.7]
Welcome back to "Is Anything Real?" the show where we unpack what's real, what's noise, and what's just another CPM spike disguised as a strategy. Here's today's hot take: If Reddit feels like a weird side alley in marketing, you're about to realize it's the whole damn city.

[00:22.1]
Today we're diving into why Reddit has quietly become a powerhouse in AI training, Google SERPs, and high consideration purchases, and how dark social isn't really dark anymore, it's just mismeasured. Joining me is Colin James Balyea, the founder of Karmic, who's running a Reddit-driven media playbook that most brands haven't even discovered yet.

[00:43.6]
Colin, welcome to the show. Hey Adam, happy to be here. Awesome. Let's rewind to that moment when you realized every search result was with Reddit. What did that signal to you? So, yeah, just quick background.

[01:00.3]
I'm a former head of Growth with Paid Media focus. About 18 months ago, I was doing some research and just sudden on Google and suddenly realized I had 30 Reddit tabs open and something clicked. I realized something is changing in the environment here. Those, those Google searches would have used to have surfaced, you know, your three standard 3,000-word hub and spoke style blog post.

[01:22.1]
So I made it my mission to figure out why that was happening and how brands can take advantage of it. Because I'm a marketer, that's what we do. And you know, 18 months later, I've gone down the rabbit hole and come out the other side and yeah, now I'm speaking the gospel. That's fantastic.

[01:38.9]
And I know you've also said, Colin, that Reddit's rise isn't just a content play. It's really a trust engine that AI tools, and I would say buyers, both rely on. How does that show up now in the search engine results page? Yeah, that's right.

[01:54.2]
So Reddit is the single most cited domain in AI search tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity. There's an official partnership between Reddit and Google that basically Google is using Reddit to train its Gemini Backend. It's AI overviews. That's the kind of main way that people interact with it.

[02:11.0]
My take on that is Google's really good at organizing the world's facts. That was its original mission. It's not so good at handling opinion based questions, aggregating the thoughts and opinions of big groups of people. But that's exactly what Reddit was built on, so these tools are layering on top of this sort of.

[02:28.4]
If you think about Reddit and Reddit's content as kind of the source material, and the AI engines are using that to kind of help make recommendations that are more contextual when people have specific questions that they ask their LLMs and/or Google search now. Yeah, that's incredible.

[02:44.2]
And I mean, I know you mentioned Google's partnership with Reddit. You know, I've also seen that LLMs are referencing Reddit more than blogs. It's now bigger than Facebook in the US and I think there's a tectonic shift in play there, especially for high consideration purchases, I imagine that's a huge impact to see.

[03:05.0]
And from your side, why does Reddit outperform traditional SEO or even last click ads for those high consideration buyer journeys? Yeah, I should clarify to say that Reddit is like an extremely good complement to traditional, performance-driven media channels, to take on that high consideration piece.

[03:26.2]
Like if you're selling like a low-ticket e-commerce product, like you can just show a picture of it and people kind of understand and you can sell, you know, boatloads of them just with direct response ads. But as soon as you're selling a service, as soon as you're selling something that costs a lot of money that people have to actually think about before buying, what inevitably ends up happening is people go and they Google to try to find other people's opinions, to either vet all of the options later to vet you and to make that decision with confidence.

[03:54.5]
Otherwise, they're just kind of left, you know, reading your slash testimonials page on your website and just wondering if they're real or not, which in most cases, you know they are, but they're filtered or whatever. So it's all about like, where do people go to actually find information that they trust before making sensitive purchases or expensive purchases or purchases that impact them materially?

[04:16.5]
And Reddit has just quietly become this behemoth in the background, like 9xing in the last two years in size by the way, which is just absurd. And it's trusted way more than anything else. And the other kind of aspect on the SEO side is like the reason why those 3,000-word blog posts aren't outranking Reddit threads anymore is because everyone has sort of gotten wise to the SEO manipulation that's been happening in the background.

[04:41.9]
You know, you find a blog post that says like "Top 10 CRMs", and surprise, surprise, number one is the domain that you're on.

[04:51.0]
The SERP has kind of turned into like a zero trust environment over the last couple of years. Not helped by the fact that Google has been disguising its paid links as organic and like the kind of pushing together of organic and paid. And it seems kind of inevitable that something like Reddit would come and take the place because there's a trust vacuum that's existed for a while.

[05:12.7]
Oh, I love that term, a trust vacuum. Being someone who's seen how that search engine results page has changed over the last 20 years, it's incredible to see how confusing and how messy it's almost gotten.

[05:28.8]
And you know, I'd love to get your take on where that messy middle you talk about sits. The zone where purchase decisions are made, but attribution, let's say, dies. Yeah. So if you think about like, brands can approach Reddit from two core ways: the organic route and the paid route.

[05:50.5]
Just like any other social media platform, we are focusing a lot more on the way that way that brands can manage Reddit organic because, if you're really trying to establish trust, that is the way to do it. But the problem is there's so many pitfalls and like minefields that brands just walk right into.

[06:08.7]
But essentially, if you want to push Reddit in your direction, let's say to influence the content that is being published and is being consumed on Reddit, you have to do a few things, but the number one thing you have to do is to actively go on as your brand or as a representative of your brand, not as yourself, without saying you're representative of the brand.

[06:33.8]
Because by the way, that is illegal since last fall, and I could talk about that for days. But you have to go in as your brand, you have to focus, above all, just adding value to the lives of your ICP, specifically in conversations that are well placed for the brand to add their perspective.

[06:53.0]
If you do this right, you earn people's trust, you earn authority, and you can later use that authority to drive people in your direction over time, but it'll happen regardless anyway as you become a known, liked, and trusted member of a given community.

[07:10.3]
That's fascinating. And I mean, I know with Karmic, you're running a dual engine there across organic Reddit brand building and paid Reddit threads. I know you've also, when we first spoke, you talked about developing this comment elicitation technique, and I think you just kind of leaned into that a little bit.

[07:28.6]
But what does that really mean, and how does it work? So we can use the comment elicitation idea with organic and paid. The one caveat with organic is you need to have a minimum account karma before you start posting your own threads from your brand account.

[07:47.3]
Basically, long story short, there's a bunch of limits that Reddit places on new accounts, and if you just go on a new account and start posting links and mentioning your brand, your content will get removed, your account will be sanctioned. Worst case, you get totally banned and maybe even your domain name banned from Reddit.

[08:07.5]
So you got to wait a while. You need at least 250 karma to start. But the idea of common elicitation is a way to kind of get around the well-known, kind of like, let's call it like advertiser hostility, or brand hostility that exists on Reddit, or brand skepticism might be a better way to put it.

[08:24.4]
Essentially, what you can do is instead of like, instead of creating content for a community where by necessity you are in the middle of it and you become a target, what you can do is curate conversations on Reddit either through organic threads or paying to promote a thread with Reddit ads.

[08:42.4]
You can essentially ask questions of the community trying to gather people's experiences, gather people's opinions into a thread that becomes a valuable resource for anyone in the future who is coming into the market. A good example of this would be a client of ours was a telehealth company that helped women who are experiencing menopause symptoms.

[09:05.1]
And one idea that we unearthed was a lot of those people were saying that they felt kind of gaslit by their doctors or like misled by their doctors, who didn't quite understand the specific symptoms, and then they suffered from much longer. So we posted a thread that was just titled like, "Have you been gaslit by your doctor about menopause?

[09:24.0]
Tell us what you think." And we got flooded with comments, and what you end up having is super valuable resource hosted by your brand. Your brand is there, your brand is commenting on every other comment, which increases the engagement of the thread even further. And you become known as this person that helped pull this information out of the community without making your brand the center of attentionm, which gets you all the brownie points and all the karma without any of the potential flak or backlash.

[09:52.5]
Wow, that's incredible. And you know, speaking to that sort of idea, many ad platforms out there punish people at scale. You've also mentioned that Reddit actually rewards you with lower CPMs if you do it right.

[10:07.6]
And I think that that's probably an example that ties back to idea that you can get more if you do it thoughtfully, and you engage in that elicitation in a way that actually not just follows the rules, but ultimately uses those rules in a way that allows you to lift up.

[10:27.9]
Yeah, because Reddit, like every other platform, wants people to stay on platform. You pay a cost per click, and you pay CPM because Reddit knows that they're losing a user for a while when they go to your website. But similarly to other ad platforms, when you accumulate social proof on an ad, you know you don't want to mess with it because your click-through rate goes higher.

[10:44.7]
That effect is just magnified like 10 to 100x on Reddit because the comments are the whole reason why people are engaging with the content in the first place. So if you post a thread, it has 0 comments, you might get a click-through rate of 1 to 2%. As soon as you have 10 comments on that ad, you have a 6, 7, 8% click through rate.

[11:02.4]
So the costs plummet. You get to put your brand front and center, you get to bypass the brand alarm bells that Redditors have. And you get to actually create genuine value for your community. That's wild. And I mean, I know Reddit has this freeform ad unit.

[11:20.2]
How would you describe that on the paid side as being different from Meta or Google's form? Yeah, so the unique, the most unique thing about Reddit is that it is text forward, and it actively just doesn't, you don't really get rewarded for video or imagery. So that's another reason why service based businesses do really well on Reddit because you can't show your product very easily.

[11:41.4]
But if you can write and explain how your product works. So a freeform ad unit, I refer to them as promoted threads because it kind of helps people who understand how Reddit works understand how this would work. In the ad unit, it's just a thread where you control the title, you control the body, you control everything.

[11:59.4]
Only it's promoted instead of just know having a 24-hour life cycle and then maybe, or maybe not getting ranked in Google search later. Interesting. Okay, and then I guess on the flip side of it, for someone who might be listening, thinking isn't Reddit a PR minefield?

[12:14.6]
How do you avoid getting buried or downvoted, at least in the clients that you service? I love this question because buried in it is the implication that everyone on Reddit just wants to dump on brands. But most of the time when that happens, it happened because brands don't invest in their communities, and they just try to extract value before giving it.

[12:36.2]
So, of course, people don't like that because they're participants in a community that they love. They have high walls because if they didn't, the community wouldn't be as valuable as it is for them. So when brands try to come and just siphon attention and steal people's eyeballs, for their own purposes, people react violently sometimes to that.

[12:57.9]
If you want to avoid that, you have to be present, you have to be transparent. You have to be there and actually give value and not just say, hey, I'm a brand, look at me, I'm a brand. Click my website. If you do that, people will actively come to your defense because, more or less, you can recruit a bunch of pseudo-ambassadors who are pumped that a brand is like taking an interest in the community and actively cares enough about them to be there and actually contribute.

[13:24.2]
Interesting, interesting. That's fascinating. And of course, I think everyone listening knows we're moving to a zero-click world.

[13:34.6]
Why is that the future and the nightmare of modern marketers these days also because that's a piece of the puzzle? Zero click is a huge topic. The way that I think about it is that as our ad platforms have gotten, and our attribution platforms, and our web analytics platforms have gotten more robust, essentially what's happened in startups is CFOs have forced marketing teams and growth teams to optimize on channels that can be measured because they are trying to put together a case to the board to get more investment.

[14:07.5]
And the way that they do that is saying, hey, if we dump more dollars in, we know we can get a 3x ROAS, so let's just keep doing that. But what's ended up happening is now everybody, there's no arbitrage on paid channels. The only way you can keep ahead is by having slightly better creative and slightly better monetization models than your competitors.

[14:24.8]
And the ad platforms are incentivized to pull as much value out of that as they can. And they do. The world of zero click is acknowledging the fact that... This is more true the higher consideration you're offering is, people don't just like view, ad, click, purchase.

[14:41.0]
They do their own research, they ask their friends, they go to Google, they go to Reddit, they find out as much as they can because they're spending money, they want to make sure that they know that they're getting the right thing for them. And there are just so many touches that happen that you couldn't possibly weigh them.

[14:59.9]
And anyone that's saying that they can weigh them all in this mixed media modeling system that gives you perfect understanding of each channel's value. It's full of shi*, frankly. The longer the journey is, the more full of shit that kind of paradigm is.

[15:16.1]
So when I think of zero click, it's just understanding and being able to identify like channels and spaces in which you know your market will be interacting with at some point, even if you can't measure every single part of it. And investing at least a portion of your marketing budget, budget in terms of people, in terms of like resource allocation towards optimizing those channels.

[15:38.7]
Even if you know, Google Analytics won't necessarily show it as a primary refer, which is the case on Reddit. So you know, a brand that is, let's just say your consumer service, you sell a subscription, it costs $200 a month. You know, high consideration, potentially high impact on people.

[15:55.5]
You know, you scale your Meta ads as much as you can, and you dedicate 20 to 30% of your budget on optimizing the spaces where people are talking about your brand topic, talking about competitors, talking about the space to make sure that your conversion rate, once people are off your website, is maintained and managed, and you're optimizing the sentiment around which people are talking about your brand.

[16:18.2]
And for a lot of these brands, that is Reddit, that is exactly what it is and what it's good for. And I mean, that sort of gets into how you have to probably coach your clients right, through Karmic, you know, thinking about it, I guess I would look at it as Reddit as the yin to Meta's yang.

[16:36.3]
Meta chases the close, Reddit influences the consideration. That's hugely impactful, especially when you get into niche verticals, right? You know, niche verticals that you're not able to scale, that don't have huge budgets, and it allows those niche verticals to scale not just vertically, but credibility-wise.

[16:58.1]
Right? That's exactly it. Like ultimately with Meta you can control the size of your top of funnel, if you want to. If you invest in organic on Reddit, you will find like incremental top of funnel, but then the missing middle, I think, is what you're getting at.

[17:13.9]
The consideration phase, which just, it's really difficult to manage because ultimately a retargeting ad is probably not going to convince them. Like they're still going to go and look at the competitors. They're going to figure out what their best options are. You can still use Meta to actively push content to them.

[17:31.8]
But we're still asking them to trust us as a brand to take their money. They're still going to go out and find other people's opinions, other people's experiences to help make their decision. Okay, all right, that's incredible. And then you kind of toed your line to this also a minute ago, Colin.

[17:49.2]
But how would you recommend brands when they look at, say, planning for 2026? How do they balance the budget, you know, for dark social, for things like Reddit? How do they take the money that they might invest on other platforms and make sure that they're supporting here?

[18:08.2]
It doesn't take a lot to get started. A lot of brands that I know that have strong organic Reddit followings are just had like a passionate founder who was a Redditor who made it a point to use Reddit as like a customer research tool in the beginning just to understand and get a strong feel for how people are acting in the market.

[18:27.9]
And then it just organically becomes like a space to present your ideas as they become more solid as the brand kind of grows. But even if you're not that early stage, you can get started for fairly low cost just by even just starting to identify communities, and identify keywords that people are talking about on Reddit.

[18:47.2]
Set up your flags so that you find that you check the subreddits every day. You get alerted when threads come up that have keywords that are relevant to you. Just watch for two, three, four weeks. Get a feel, make sure you create your account. And then when it seems right and you have something to say, go and start adding a few comments.

[19:06.5]
And don't promote yourself, don't link to yourself, absolutely don't, except in your profile. Just start to give value. And you should start to see some qualitative feedback pretty quickly in the form of upvotes, in the form of conversation happening around your comment that should Give you some qualitative, directional feedback, towards the idea that it's doing something, it's impacting people in a real way.

[19:32.9]
That's incredibly impactful. Colin, this was a killer conversation. You know, moving from AI training data to click -through rate strategy without breaking a sweat. That's not a small task to work around. Where can folks find more about what you're building at Karmic and maybe follow your comment trail down a few of those rabbit holes you mentioned?

[19:54.3]
For sure. So I'm talking about Reddit on my LinkedIn. Colin James Belyea. You can find our 2025 guide to Reddit organic at our website with karmic.com. It's the exact process we use with our clients. And if you want to talk about, like, if you want to do it yourself, use that guide.

[20:11.2]
If you need some help, just hit me up, and we can talk about potentially working together and making that work for you. Cool. And then for, for marketers listening who are running those Meta ads, running Google Ads, and wondering why their pipeline is thriving. You know, what's your advice for a brand just getting started on Reddit today?

[20:28.6]
Is it organic or is it paid first at the simplest level. So we always recommend doing organic first because it forces you to build the attribution and tracking systems that you will need to track Reddit paid if you decide to do it down the line.

[20:43.9]
Plus, you'll know the communities much better, which will allow you to make actually relevant Reddit ad creative, which is really hard to do from scratch out the gate if you haven't been involved in the communities for a long time. Awesome. That's great. Well, you know, thank you, Colin, and thanks for tuning into "Is Anything Real?", the show where we find the signal behind the noise.

[21:03.7]
I'm Adam W. Barney, Head to AdamWBarney.com. Please review, check out the systems. And one last thing, Colin, I'd mention here also, if you're ignoring Reddit in 2025 and 2026, you're not falling behind, you're marketing to ghosts.

[21:21.4]
So let's stop chasing clicks and let's start shaping conversations. Awesome. Thanks for having me, Adam. This was fun.