Reddit to let users hide ads from specific advertisers

Social platform Reddit will be introducing a new feature which allows its users to hide ads from their feeds. In a post seen on the Reddit Safety thread by an employee known as cozy_sheets, the function will be rolled out in an update from this week onwards.  

By clicking ‘hide’ on an ad, future ads from the same advertiser account will be automatically muted for at least a year. After that period of time, users will have the option to re-hide the ad again.

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According to the announcement, the update will gradually become available across iOS, Android, and the Reddit website over the next several weeks. Meanwhile the ‘hide’ option will be available for any ads that appear in feeds, such as users’ home or sub-reddit feed.  

The announcement also highlighted Reddit’s ‘report’ feature, which allows users to report ads that violate the platform’s policies. Reporting an ad will also automatically hide it for Redditors.  

According to Ars Technica, users have complained about the system’s failure in the same thread as the announcement. Another Redditor noted that they have hit a daily limit for hiding ads. However, Reddit did not provide any details on the limits in place for how many advertisers each user can block.  

Prior to this update, Reddit already let users block advertising related to “sensitive” categories such as alcohol, dating, gambling, politics and activism, pregnancy and parenting, religion and spirituality, as well as weight loss. In its support page, Reddit said that limiting ads in a sensitive category will not change a user’s ads personalisation choices, but it will do its best to not show ads within the selected categories.  

“We’ll continue working on ways to improve ad controls and share more along the way. Let us know any additional feedback in the comments”, the announcement read. The platform currently offers an ad-free browsing experience through Reddit Premium, starting from US$5.99 per month.  

Previously, Ars Technica also reported that Redditors are likely to see more ads on the platform over the next few years as Reddit began testing ads in the comments section last year. Reddit executives also shared that contextual ads, which are shown based on the content surrounding them, will be a bigger focus for Reddit by 2026.  

This upcoming ad-hiding function might give some form of control back to Redditors, but it also brings up the question if Reddit could lose ad slots because of it. In 2024, Reddit’s total revenue increased 62% year on year to US$1.3 billion. The main chunk of which was made up of US$1.2 billion in ad revenue, accounting for 92% of its total earnings.

Just this month, Reddit launched new tools aimed at assisting users to better understand community rules and content performance. Before a user posts, they can check if their content may be in conflict with a community's rules. Reddit stated that the new tool helps users avoid accidentally breaking rules and having their post removed. If a post is removed due to community rules, a prompt will now appear that provides a streamlined method to repost the content to an alternative subreddit.

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