I can't find a link but a while back on TWIT Leo Laporte said something along the lines of: "Multiple advertisers have declined to spend money with us because our audience is 'too smart'".
The advertisers definition of 'too smart' being: unlikely to be persuaded by advertising, would comparison shop on the internet, and lacked strong brand loyalty.
I think Reddit is in much the same category, add to this that all ads can be 'Reddited' (commented and voted on by the community) and I imagine many brands are terrified of advertising on their as they'd at a minimum have to assign someone to respond to comments and worst case it would turn into a debacle ala Microsoft's IE9 advertising on Reddit (where the PR team answering questions was openly derided as being flaks and doing nothing but answering technical questions with blathering marketing speak).
Advertisers might not have warmed to it yet but I much prefer advertising that is a 2 way street. The good products and services rise to the top whereas the empty marketing speak approaches fail.
Months ago an SMS provider advertised on reddit. Rather than downvote or ignore the link, there was a veritable flame war of people signing up for the beta just to waste the advertiser's time and quite a bit of animosity going back and forth. Even though most of the people in that conversation wouldn't have utilized the service, they attacked the advertiser because anything involving SMS must be spam.
Having witnessed many cases where redditors attacked, I would never consider advertising there. I can only imagine most of their advertisers advertise once and never again.
The advertisers definition of 'too smart' being: unlikely to be persuaded by advertising, would comparison shop on the internet, and lacked strong brand loyalty.
I think Reddit is in much the same category, add to this that all ads can be 'Reddited' (commented and voted on by the community) and I imagine many brands are terrified of advertising on their as they'd at a minimum have to assign someone to respond to comments and worst case it would turn into a debacle ala Microsoft's IE9 advertising on Reddit (where the PR team answering questions was openly derided as being flaks and doing nothing but answering technical questions with blathering marketing speak).