Should You Start Your Own Subreddit to Promote Your Product

The idea is simple. Do not put your product link in a Reddit comment, because moderators delete it. Put a link to a subreddit you run instead, then post what you like inside. This page tests whether that works.

Swapping your product link for a subreddit link does not escape the self-promotion rule

The plan rests on one assumption, which is that a subreddit link belongs to a different category from a link to your product. The rule that gets these comments removed does not have those two categories in it.

• The most quoted guideline on Reddit is that no more than 10 of your last 100 posts and comments should promote something you own, and a subreddit you moderate is something you own.
• Self-promotion guides define the offence as promoting your own thing, and they count a product mention with no link at all as self-promotion.
• Some subreddits remove any comment from an account with any self-promotion in its history, which is a stricter test than 10 in 100 and one that a subreddit link fails immediately.
• Reddit removed roughly 70% of automated posting accounts in a 2025 spam sweep, so the platform is tightening this, not loosening it.

Moderators judge your comment history, not who owns the subreddit you linked

That rule only matters if somebody notices, and moderators are unpaid volunteers rather than Reddit staff, so it is fair to ask how any of them would know a subreddit is yours. They never find out, and they never need to, because the thing that gets your comment removed is already sitting in public.

• Your entire comment history is public, and a moderator opens it by clicking your username.
• A run of comments all pointing at the same subreddit shows up in that history as an obvious pattern, whoever runs the place.
• Reddit hands a moderator team your full profile history for 28 days after you comment in their community, even if you have hidden your profile from everybody else.
• AutoModerator can remove any comment containing "r/" from an account under a karma threshold before a human being reads a word of it.
• Moderators cannot see your IP address, your email address or your other accounts, because only Reddit staff can see those.
• Nobody has to prove the subreddit is yours, because a run of comments plugging somebody else's subreddit is removed in exactly the same way.

The three systems moderate your comments and Reddit's own system uses AI

Three different things can delete your comment, run by three different parties, at three different speeds. Only the first is a machine that learns.

• Reddit's own site-wide filter runs first, uses machine learning, and rates every account on a hidden five-tier score before anybody has complained.
• AutoModerator runs second, is written by volunteer moderators as plain keyword rules rather than AI, and matches phrases, account age, karma and banned websites.
• Human moderators run last, usually only after somebody reports you, and they made more than 52% of all removals between July and December 2025.

One subreddit member is worth 0.4 to 2.1 clicks a month on whatever link you post

A member is worth whatever they click, and the link can be anything you want. Only two company subreddits have ever had that rate published, both measured by Foundation Inc, and both happened to be pointing at a website.

• The Mint Mobile subreddit has about 47,000 members and sends about 101,000 clicks a month, which is 2.15 clicks per member per month.
• The 1Password subreddit has about 39,000 members and sends about 17,000 clicks a month, which is 0.44 clicks per member per month.
• Mint Mobile and 1Password both counted their rate as visits to a website, because a website is the only destination a company can measure in its own analytics.
• The link you post in your own subreddit can just as easily be an App Store page, a Play Store page, a Facebook group, a Discord invite or a signup form, and a member clicking one of those is worth the same as a member clicking a website.
• The Mint Mobile rate and the 1Password rate differ by 4.9 times, and no published source says which of them a new subreddit should expect.
• A link posted in somebody else's comment section is clicked once and then gone, while a member keeps clicking 0.4 to 2.1 times a month for as long as they stay.

Your own subreddit takes 45 months to beat a product link posted straight in the comment

Two ways to write the same comment. Your product link pays you today and never again. A subreddit link pays you nothing today, then a little every month for as long as members stay. So when does slow and forever beat fast and once?

• Your product link in the comment earns 312 clicks in month one, and 312 again every month after.
• A subreddit link earns 14 clicks in month one, because only 31 people join and each clicks 0.44 times.
• The subreddit does not overtake the product link until month 45.
• At the Mint Mobile rate of 2.15 clicks per member, the subreddit overtakes the product link in month 9.
• Stopping every moderator deletion, which is the whole point of the plan, only moves month 45 to month 29.

Those numbers assume 30 comments a month, 800 readers each, a third deleted, 2 readers in 100 clicking, 1 in 10 joining, and nobody ever leaving.

Reddit staff can ban your subreddit and remove you as moderator, so in reality you never own one

The appeal of the plan is that you end up owning the place you send people to. Moderators are only the first layer of Reddit, and the layer above them can take that place off you.

• Reddit staff sit above every moderator and enforce their own rules, which no subreddit moderator can overrule.
• Reddit's Content Policy Rule 2 bans interfering with or disrupting other Reddit communities, which is what taking members out of somebody else's subreddit looks like from the outside.
• The Moderator Code of Conduct Rule 3 says your community must not be used to direct, coordinate or encourage interference in other communities.
• There are three separate punishments above a removed comment, which are a ban from that subreddit, a site-wide suspension from Reddit staff, and a shadowban that hides your posts without telling you.
• Reddit staff can remove you as moderator and ban the subreddit outright, so the community you spent a year building is not yours the way your website is.

Use Camera to Clipboard to put a phone photo into your Reddit post

If a link in your comment is the thing that gets removed, a picture is the thing that does not. A Reddit post carrying a real photograph of the thing being discussed reads as somebody showing their work, and it is the safest promotional post there is. The awkward part is that the photo is on your phone and the post is being written on your computer. Camera to Clipboard, one of my own apps, closes that gap by putting the photo straight onto your computer's clipboard.

• You take a photo on your phone and it lands on your computer's clipboard, so the next thing you do is press paste in the Reddit post box.
• You pair the phone and the computer once by scanning a QR code on the screen, and after that there is nothing to set up again.
• Nothing is emailed to yourself and nothing is uploaded to a shared folder first, which are the two steps that usually stop people posting the picture at all.

Only 5% of the 2.8 million subreddits on Reddit have a conversation on any given day

The plan assumes the subreddit exists and has people in it. Getting to that point is the largest piece of unpriced work in the whole idea.

• Reddit holds about 2.8 million subreddits and roughly 138,000 of them have discussion daily, so about 5% of all subreddits are alive.
• Most new subreddits stop getting posts within their first 90 days.
• Published growth guides put the share of new subreddits that ever reach 10,000 members at about 5%, which is the same survival rate arrived at a second way.
• Reddit does not put a brand new subreddit in front of anybody, so nothing at all happens to a subreddit you create and leave alone.
• The most optimistic published plan for reaching 10,000 members asks for 45 minutes a day for 6 to 12 months.
• The idea needs a subreddit worth arriving at before the first comment is written, and building that is a year of work that pays nothing while it runs.

Mint Mobile and 1Password had their customers before they had their subreddits

The two subreddits whose clicks have been counted are the evidence everybody cites for company subreddits, and both were built by companies that already had the audience.

• Mint Mobile and 1Password were both national brands with paying customers before either subreddit existed, so the members arrived already knowing the product.
• The Sonos subreddit has 261,000 members and Sonos has been selling speakers since 2002, so the community followed the product rather than creating demand for it.
• Reddit reports 121 million daily active users, so those members were already on Reddit and the subreddit only gave them somewhere to gather.
• A subreddit measured this way is a place where existing customers ask questions, which is a support and retention channel rather than a way to find new buyers.
• Nobody has published a case of a company subreddit that produced an audience for a product with no audience, which is the exact case a new product needs a subreddit to handle.

Use Repeat Recorder to hear how you actually sound

A short break from Reddit for one of my own apps. Repeat Recorder records you and plays it straight back with no gap in between, which is the fastest way to hear yourself and fix what is wrong.

• You speak and hear it back a second later, so you catch the problem while the sentence is still in your head.
• Automatic mode starts recording when you speak and replays when you stop, so you can go again without touching the screen.
• You can save the takes worth keeping into folders you name yourself.

A big subreddit puts you in Google and AI answers faster than a subreddit you start

Reddit pages rank in Google and AI answers quote them. That is real, and it is the best reason to be on Reddit at all. It is not a reason to start a subreddit.

• Reddit takes about 842 million clicks a month from United States Google search.
• A study of 1,486 business software buying questions found Reddit in 81.6% of Google's AI-enhanced results.
• Google quotes a Reddit thread word for word in 20.1% of the questions asked by somebody about to buy.
• A Reddit page only ranks once it has real discussion on it, and a subreddit you started last week has none.
• The Cloudflare subreddit earns about 18,000 visitors a month from search, and it needed 34,000 members to get there.
• Posting the same question in a subreddit that already has readers puts you in those search results today instead.

See how Reddit powers AI answers for what those engines do with a Reddit page once they find it.

Your Reddit profile bio holds the one link no moderator can remove

The instinct behind the plan is right, which is that the link should not sit in the comment. There is already a place for it that costs nothing and takes a minute.

• Every comment you write carries your username, and the username is a link to your profile.
• Your profile holds a bio and a link, and it sits on a page that subreddit moderators have no power over.
• A moderator can remove your comment and ban you from their subreddit, and neither action touches your profile.
• Reddit Pro is free for a verified business account and gives you a business profile, brand mention monitoring, post scheduling and post analytics.
• A link in your profile bio works because you never mention it, and it fails if your comments are worthless, because nobody clicks the name of somebody who was no help.

Never write "click my profile" or "link in bio", because those phrases are deleted on sight

There is one way to waste the profile bio, and it is the thing most people try first. The bio link survives because the comment carries no promotion. Telling people to go and look at it puts the promotion back into the comment, where a moderator can delete it.

• The phrases "check out my" and "link in bio" are two of the commonest ones moderators tell AutoModerator to delete.
• "Please click my profile to learn more" is the same kind of phrase, so the same keyword rule catches it.
• AutoModerator matches the words you typed and nothing else, so it does not care that the link itself sits somewhere it cannot reach.
• Reddit's self-promotion guides count naming your product with no link at all as self-promotion, so deleting the words "link in bio" and keeping the sales pitch does not save the comment either.
• You cannot look up which phrases a subreddit blocks, because moderators keep the rule list private so that spammers cannot work around it.
• A profile bio link only works when you never point at it, because every comment already carries your username as a link to it.

Putting your offer in your user flair works, but only where moderators allow free text

Some people never write a promotional word at all. They put the offer in their user flair instead, where a rule that scans the words of a comment cannot reach it.

• Your user flair is a label of up to 64 characters beside your name, and it shows on every comment you write in that subreddit.
• Writing "free voice training" in that flair advertises on every one of your comments without a single promotional word inside any of them.
• AutoModerator normally reads the words of the comment, so a rule hunting for "link in bio" never sees a flair at all.
• AutoModerator can be pointed at flair as well, because it has a built-in author flair text value moderators can match rules against.
• Most large subreddits only let you pick from flair templates the moderators wrote, so there is no free text box to type your offer into.
• A moderator sees your flair beside your name on every comment of yours they read, and can delete it in two clicks and ban you.

So it survives the keyword rule and fails the human one.

The real cost of running a subreddit is 20 to 50 support questions a day, every day

The bill is not the clicks the subreddit fails to send. It is the questions it creates, and they start long before any clicks do.

• An agency running these programmes tells brands to expect 20 to 50 extra customer support questions a day once the subreddit is open.
• Support questions arrive every day and never stop, which is the cost nobody budgets for.
• A new subreddit sends you no clicks at all for its first 6 to 12 months, and the well known ones took 2 to 4 years to get where they are now.
• The Duolingo subreddit saw a 1,400% increase in support content while Duolingo had two full-time customer service staff on it.
• Duolingo's volunteer moderators publicly revolted in January 2025 and removed every support post from the subreddit.

Use Camera to Clipboard to skip emailing photos to yourself

One more of my own apps. Most people move a photo from their phone to their computer by emailing it to themselves or putting it in a cloud folder. Camera to Clipboard puts it straight on the computer's clipboard instead, so you just press paste.

• You take the photo on your phone and press paste on your computer, with no email and no cloud folder in between.
• You pair the phone and the computer once by scanning a QR code, and it stays paired after that.
• The desktop app runs on both Windows and macOS.

Conclusion: should you start your own subreddit?

No, you should not. It is not a good idea.

• Do not swap your product link for a subreddit link to dodge moderators, because they judge the account, not the link.
• Post in a big subreddit to reach Google and the AI answers, rather than starting your own.
• Expect 6 to 12 months before a new subreddit sends you a single click, and only about 5% of them survive.