Reddit’s acquisition spree continued this morning with news that the company is bringing the viewership content company’s Spiketrap technology in-house. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Reddit said Spiketrap’s AI-powered contextual analysis and tools will help Reddit improve ad quality scoring and leverage predictive models to automatically boost bidding.
The deal shows Reddit is growing in its advertising business as it allows advertisers to target relevant audiences based on interest. The deal comes at a time when Apple’s consumer privacy tools, app tracking transparency, or ATT, are affecting the effectiveness of online ads on major tech platforms like Facebook and Snap.
In the year San Francisco-based Spiketrap, founded in 2016 by Kieran Sean Fitzpatrick, Virgilio Pigliucci and Andrea Vatani, will lay off more than 20 employees, according to its website. The company uses proprietary Clair AI technology that can extract “signal from noise” in unstructured data sets. Combined with Knowledge Graph, the company offers a range of solutions in contextual ad targeting, impact measurement, brand safety monitoring and other research and data-as-a-service solutions, he said.
In particular, it introduces technology that does things like recognizing elements that a particular piece of content refers to, even if they aren’t explicitly mentioned in places like movies, TV shows, games, franchises, and more. This AI can deal with ambiguities, acronyms and abbreviations, the company notes. Meanwhile, the emotional AI can detect the emotion surrounding a post, such as happiness, sarcasm or toxicity – the latter area Reddit has struggled with for years, often having to shut down hateful and depressing subreddits that engage in harassment. And others that advertisers want to avoid. Most recently, he banned the r/Donaldtrump subreddit after the January 6 riots.
“The richness of conversation in our 100,000+ active communities is what makes Reddit unique and so valuable to advertisers. “We believe that targeting relevant audiences based on interests and the context of their conversations will help advertisers reach the right people in a more efficient way,” Reddit EVP of ad monetization Shariq Rizvi said in a statement about the deal. . We’ve been actively investing in this solution for some time and this acquisition completes Reddit’s capabilities and takes it to the next level. I’m excited to welcome the Spiketrap team to the Reddit family,” added Rizvi.
Today’s announcement follows other recent acquisitions by Reddit, including Spell in June, a platform for running machine learning experiments, and natural language processing company MeaningCloud in July. Along with the former, Reddit can use ML technology to improve its capabilities in several areas – such as the new Discover tab recommendations and its security work and targeted advertising work. MeaningCloud, similar to Spiketrap, introduced its ability to provide meaning even from unstructured content, suggesting that Reddit has broader goals to make rapid improvements in this area, particularly in the ability to serve advertisers.
Reddit says that Spiketrap’s team of 15 people has already joined the company and will lead several projects in the advertising business. Currently, Reddit is focused on integrating Spiketrap’s tools, technologies and resources into Reddit, and the business continuity strategy will be part of this transition, the company announced.
“Our goal is to always make language relevant and real-time to help creators, brands and platforms truly understand and meaningfully engage their audiences,” said Kieran Fitzpatrick, CEO and co-founder of Spiketrap, in an announcement. As part of Reddit, we look forward to furthering these efforts.
Spiketrap was released in 2010. It raised $3.5 million per seed round in 2020, but did not disclose the estimate, a Reddit spokesperson confirmed. The Spiketrap race round was led by Sousa, 645, Pathbreaker and Anorak. Following the acquisition, the Spiketrap team will retain senior positions within Reddit’s product and engineering organization, and former Spiketrap CEO and co-founder Kieran Fitzpatrick will join as director of product, he said.
