They were already using a third party service. It was slow and opaque, so they ditched it.
At the scale of reddit, and because this is how they make their money, this is clearly something they want in house and something it would be a competitive advantage to control, if nothing else it gives them a much clearer conduit to their advertisers, and much greater control over things like ad selection.
The problem with Reddit ads isn't their tech, it's their people. The ad approval process is a farce - and human-managed. Oh, and those humans are assholes. You have to go through many denials - for no reason - submit a ticket to get another approver and approved - for no reason stated. It was the most upsetting process I've ever dealt with.
It seems odd that there's a stringent ad approval process when the site proudly lets Redditors post any garbage they want. I'd have expected anything SFW and not obviously fraudulent to be allowed.
It's obviously not very stringent. A lot of the ads they run lately are outright scams, including even advertising Scientology: https://i.redd.it/6cd1ricqc8j11.jpg
It sounds bureaucratic, not stringent. Lots of forms to fill out, and a lot of order, and probably not even many requirements to meet (but a lot of different ways saying you did meet them) but lost its purpose a long ways back.
More-pertinently, I wonder how many of the developers of reddit's new ad system themselves have ad blockers installed. Do any of them actually see the results of their work?
Reddit ads were what finally pushed me into install ublock origin about a year ago (redditor since 2007).
They had a misbehaving ad (downloaded a ton of "stuff" over and over and over). I reported it on one of the their support subreddits and was told "don't recognize the add urls. scan your system for a virus". It was a pretty good error report too (screen shots, console log, etc).
Installed ublock origin that day and haven't looked back.
FWIW, when I worked at reddit, I never ran an ad blocker. In fact, I didn't run one for about five years after, until my CPU started spiking on just about every web page I visited.
But even then, I whitelisted reddit.
So my guess is yes, they see the output of their work.
This is a pretty emotionally driven comment and would do well to provide some sort of concrete story behind why the ad approval process is a farce and why this particular group of individuals happens to be full of assholes?
I advertised for a travel site in the travel reddits. I never got a single ad approved "out the door" - only after I opened a ticket and asked why they were not approved did someone actually respond and approve it. The denial was within a few minutes of submission and the approval only after I opened a ticket in which case the response was "We're sorry, we've approved the ads" - but no one ever answered the question of editorial review.
It may appear "emotionally driven" because my experience with reddit ads has been terrible. I struggled through it, i followed the example ads, i created very topical ads and when i finally got all approved and done, they just didn't perform well either. I talked with peers in the industry and they all avoid reddit ads for the most part because of similar experiences. I haven't spent any money with ya'll since that bad taste experience.
for me, it would just be easier to site target reddit through google and do adwords for desktop/web traffic.
The editorial review literally feels like some redditor judging your ad on personal opinion vs an editorial review for passing some kind of targetable creative process. That's a terrible way to treat paying customers and i don't that experience on any other market i advertise on.
I agree that it's important to keep the money-making component of a business free from external dependency to a large degree, but I think there's some liability that's being ignored here. A 3 person team built such an important piece of Reddit in a language they never used in production? I hope the team was at least experienced in ad-tech.
At the scale of reddit, and because this is how they make their money, this is clearly something they want in house and something it would be a competitive advantage to control, if nothing else it gives them a much clearer conduit to their advertisers, and much greater control over things like ad selection.