On January 9, Reddit announced that it named Shariq Rizvi as vice president of ad products and engineering of the company. Rizvi will be leading Reddit’s monetization and ads product team, as well as report to Steve Huffman, the CEO of Reddit. Rizvi, who was most recently the co-founder and COO of Netsil, which is a monitoring platform for modern cloud applications, served as Twitter’s co-founder of performance ads business and a director on its ads team from 2012 to 2016.
Now that Reddit has added Rezvi to the team, the company’s goal is to take its performance and direct response ad offerings to a new level.
“Reddit offers a powerful solution to the human need for true community and authentic communication, which I’ve experienced first-hand. Aside from the clear value for users and advertisers, there’s also an obvious match between my knowledge, experience, skill set and what Reddit needs right now –– to scale up the online ads platform,” said Rizvi.
The last year was spent rolling out a complete redesign of Reddit’s website along with launching new ad offerings, such as native video ads, native promoted post ads and new call-to-action buttons for ads.
Steve Huffman commented on the company’s recent efforts to build out its ad platform in the same announcement as Rizvi’s hire.
“Throughout 2018, we’ve demonstrated the value of engaging with our community — and new inventory like native mobile and native video ads in the redesign have showcased the opportunity for branded engagement. While video and engagement campaigns will always remain a focus for Reddit’s Brand Partnerships team, Shariq’s hire represents an additional investment in a more robust, performance-driven suite of advertising solutions for marketers in 2019,” said Huffman.