What Six Weeks of Reddit Ads Taught a Music Platform

We ran Reddit ads for Videojam from 7 August to 17 September 2026, and on 19 September we stopped them indefinitely.

The documented spend is €363.04. The real total is higher, and I do not know by how much: only two windows of spend were ever written down. That gap runs through everything below, so I will say it once up front. This post is about what six weeks of paid traffic showed us, and it is just as much about what the numbers cannot show.

1. What we bought

Reddit sent about 657 landers across five campaign tags and six named ad creatives. A "lander" here is a visitor-day, not a person: someone who came back on a second day counts twice. Every campaign except one chart promotion sent people to the same page, /dj-sets.

It began as a mobile flood. The first two campaigns, on 7 to 9 August, were 93 to 94% mobile and came through the Reddit app's in-app browser: 214 landers in about two days. That browser strips the referrer. On 8 and 9 August there were 226 Reddit-tagged visits and only 11 carried a reddit.com referrer, so without campaign tags on every link the launch would have been almost invisible to us. We switched to desktop targeting on 9 August, and every campaign after that was 94 to 98% desktop.

The spend we can document:

| window | spend | clicks | cost per click | |---|---:|---:|---:| | 8 to 17 August | €309.25 | 201 | €1.54 | | 30 August | €53.79 | 40 | €1.34 | | documented total | €363.04 | 241 | |

Not every click became a landed visit (about 75% did in the first window and 62.5% in the second), so per visitor who actually landed it was roughly €2.06 to €2.15. The launch mobile spend, 20 to 29 August, and 31 August to 17 September were never documented. So I cannot give you a true cost per sign-up, and I am not going to estimate one here.

2. What it produced

We could only attribute sign-ups to a source from 2 September, when the attribution code shipped. From then until the end:

• 4 registrations came from Reddit, all from the same ad creative, on 2, 3, 13 and 13 September.
• That is about 3% of the roughly 127 to 142 Reddit landers in that window.
• A three-day burst at the end of August (65 landers) coincided with zero registrations from any source.

One detail I like: the first Reddit-attributed user listened anonymously for four days before signing up. We know because signing in uploads the listening history stored on the device.

There is a tempting number from August. Registrations went from 3 in July to 22 between 7 and 28 August, while Reddit was running. But August also had a chart campaign, social referrals, product launches and a few team and friends sign-ups, and none of those 22 can be attributed to anything. I do not know how many of them Reddit caused, so I am not claiming any.

3. They pressed play, then left

Here are Reddit visitors against direct visitors, 13 August to 18 September:

| | Reddit referrer | direct | |---|---:|---:| | pressed play | 75.1% | 68.2% | | plays per visitor who played | 2.28 | 5.35 | | reached 30 seconds of a video (of those who played) | 22.5% | 31.2% |

Reddit visitors were more likely to press play. Then they played fewer than half as many videos each, and fewer of them stayed with any single video for 30 seconds. Every read we took from August onwards showed the same shape.

Two cautions. First, we measure plays and a 30-second mark, not watch time, so this is not "they watched half as long". Second, the direct group is not clean. It includes our own test sessions in private windows, which play a lot of videos, and Reddit visitors whose referrer was lost after they clicked through the site. Both could make the gap look bigger than it is.

4. The first 30 seconds

Three in four Reddit visitors pressed play. Fewer than one in four of those reached 30 seconds of any single video. The 30-second counter credits playback only while the tab is visible and ignores seeks. It does not require sound. Direct visitors mostly did not get there either: more than two in three who played never reached it.

Our hypothesis was the muted start. The DJ-sets pages start playing with the sound off, and when we read through the player code we found nothing of ours under the video: a click on a muted video went straight to YouTube's embedded player, where, with YouTube's own controls turned off, it would most likely pause the video rather than turn the sound on. We never confirmed that in a browser, so it stays a hypothesis.

The ways we asked people to sign up were not working either:

• A passive sign-up prompt was shown 86 times across the whole site in this window and got zero clicks. It has never had one. Its dismiss button records through the same tracking path, so the zero is real behaviour, not a broken counter.
• A sign-in modal on a 45-second timer got 6 Google clicks from 129 showings across the whole site, 4.7%.

On 3 September the call was to ask at moments of intent instead of writing better copy, and to land people on the set with the sound on.

5. What we changed

On 15 and 16 September we shipped the "first click" work:

• A click or tap anywhere on a muted video now turns the sound on instead of reaching YouTube's player, and while the video is muted a "Tap for sound" control takes the place of the volume control in the player bar. The click layer disappears once sound is on, so pausing works normally after that.
• The first click anywhere on the page, apart from the cookie banner, turns sound on once.
• The sign-up ask moved to moments of intent: after a signed-out visitor hearts a video, or after 45 seconds of playback with sound. It appears as a card that never covers the player, with Google sign-in first.
• We started counting unmutes, once per video and only when a person asks for sound, so autoplay carrying sound over between pages does not count.

The timed modal stayed as it was.

Did it work? I do not know. The new card was shown seven times before the campaign stopped, and unmute tracking had two to three days of data. That is far too little to read, and I would rather say so than borrow a trend from it.

6. The channel we were not paying for

Over the same period, ChatGPT sent us at most 19 visitor-days and 3 attributed registrations: at least 15.8%, against Reddit's roughly 3%. On paper that is about five times the rate. With 3 and 4 sign-ups it could be noise, and the two are counted differently (ChatGPT by referrer, Reddit by campaign tag). I read it as a direction, not a result.

The other organic signal is an absence. The DJ-sets pages, where every Reddit campaign sent people, have had 3 visitors from Google all-time, against 390 from Reddit, even though all 27 of those URLs are indexable, server-rendered and in the sitemap. Paid traffic filled a page that search was not yet sending anyone to.

7. After we stopped

The earlier version of this post was written the day we decided to stop, so it could not say what stopping cost. Four days later we had a first answer.

Comparing the four days after the stop (19 to 23 September) with the four days before it (15 to 19 September):

• Visitor-days fell from 117 to 89, about a quarter, and pageviews from 368 to 308. That is what losing Reddit predicts: it had been landing almost entirely on /dj-sets, and that page dropped out of our top 15.
• Registrations from outside the team went from 2 to 3. In both windows the only source we could attribute any of them to was ChatGPT.

So stopping cost us no registration we can measure, while it removed a slice of traffic that was not converting anyway. Four days is a short window and these are small numbers, so this is a direction, not a result.

8. What the process taught us

Some of the most useful lessons had nothing to do with Reddit's audience:

• We never reached our own decision thresholds. Before the campaign we committed to cut rules: judge a creative only after about 50 clicks, and cut it at more than twice the cost per play of the creative running alongside it. No creative ever got there, so no creative decision was ever made on evidence.
• Toggling the campaign on and off by hand broke our tests. It left a pre-committed falsification test unreadable and froze a two-tier test at 12 landers against 9. The lesson we wrote down on 17 September: control the budget with the daily amount, not the on/off switch.
• The ad platform's pixel could barely see us. It fires only for visitors who accept advertising cookies, about 15% of them, so any conversion-optimised delivery would have been optimising against near-silence.
• Fresh zeros in the ads dashboard are usually reporting delay.
• We contaminated our own data. Checking the product in private windows added sessions that our analytics opt-out could not see, at times most of a day's pageviews: 60 of 85 on 16 September.
• One of our counters never worked. The sign-up completion event fired before the analytics queue existed. The database is the only registration count we trust.

9. What this data cannot tell you

• A true cost per registration. The spend for 2 to 13 September, when all four Reddit sign-ups happened, was never exported.
• Whether the August rise in registrations came from Reddit.
• Which ad creative or targeting tier was better on engagement.
• Whether the first-click changes worked.
• Whether the users Reddit brought stayed. Their retention has not been read since early September.
• Why the DJ-sets pages get no search traffic. That needs Search Console, not this data.

If I ran it again, I would tag every link, attribute sign-ups from the first day, set a daily budget and leave it alone, and fix the first 30 seconds before paying anyone to see them.

10. What we are doing differently

We are not restarting Reddit ads the way we ran them. If we come back to paid social, it will be with a spend export we can reconcile daily and a fixed budget instead of a switch anyone can flip mid-test. In the meantime the effort goes to the channel that is converting for free right now: pages specific and clear enough that ChatGPT and similar tools cite them.

None of this is a case against Reddit ads in general. Our creative, our landing page and our targeting were each probably leaving sign-ups on the table, and we never isolated which one, because we never ran a clean test long enough to find out. What I can say is that for six weeks and €363 of documented spend, this run did not pay for itself, and turning it off did not cost us anything we could measure.