• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, September 2, 2022

Reddit moved deeper into advertising this week with the purchase of the audience contextualization company Spiketrap.

The announcement, made Thursday, highlights the company's focus on exploring more ways to reach readers through advertising.

Spiketrap helps brands and platforms to better understand and engage their audiences through AI-powered contextual analysis and tools. It focuses on advertising relevance and performance through quality scoring, engagement prediction, and targeting.

The integration of the contextualization company aims to enhance Reddit’s ad quality scoring and support its prediction models.

Spiketrap CEO and co-founder Kieran Fitzpatrick said the focus is on contextualizing language and real-time support for platforms, brands, and creators. It aims to help businesses better understand audiences and engagement.

“We're looking forward to scaling these efforts even further as part of Reddit," he wrote in a blog post.

The announcement follows Reddit’s recent acquisitions of Spell and MeaningCloud, and is the latest example of its commitment to evolving algorithms and recommendation engines in ways that don’t merely optimize for engagement and attention, but for value—the value Reddit’s content brings to individual users, their communities, and our advertising partners on the platform and in the real world.

Other co-founders in 2016 include Virgilio Pigliucci, and the company’s chief scientist Andrea Vattani. The company employed about 20, per its website. The company offers services in audience intelligence, contextual advertising, brand safety monitoring, competitive intelligence, Influencer media planning, and campaign impact reporting.

Research advisors include Alessandro Panconesi, full professor and 2019 Dijkstra prize recipient at Sapienza University of Rome; and Flavio Chierichetti, full professor at Sapienza University of Rome.