Reddit's Max campaigns beta, launched on January 5, 2026, is producing its first documented publisher results - and the numbers from The Times are drawing attention across the digital advertising industry. The 200-year-old British newspaper achieved a 2x improvement in conversion rate and a 26% increase in click-through rate using the automated campaign format, according to a case study published by Reddit for Business. The results have since been amplified by Sam Hughes, Sales and Go-To-Market Leader at Reddit, via a LinkedIn post that quickly gathered 96 reactions and 9 reposts within days of publication.

The case study is notable not only for the performance figures but also for what it reveals about how a legacy media brand - one that has been publishing since the early 19th century - is now deploying AI-driven programmatic tools to grow its digital subscriber base.

What Max campaigns actually do

Max campaigns are Reddit's most fully automated advertising format. Unlike traditional Reddit campaigns that require advertisers to configure ad groups, set bids, and manage creative variants manually, Max campaigns operate at the campaign level, removing granular configuration requirements entirely. The system automatically optimises every impression, selecting which creative asset - headline, image, or call-to-action - is most likely to drive a conversion for a given user at a given moment.

According to Reddit's announcement, split tests run against business-as-usual campaigns showed that Max campaigns delivered 17% lower cost per action and 27% more conversions on average across advertisers in the beta. The minimum budget threshold is set at $20 for daily budgets or $620 for lifetime budgets. Conversion-focused campaigns require advertisers to select an optimisation window before launch - a setting that cannot be changed after the campaign goes live, according to Reddit's documentation.

The system also recommends leaving campaigns stable for at least 14 days following creation or major edits. This allows the underlying model to calibrate properly, a constraint that advertisers accustomed to frequent manual intervention may find limiting.

The Times' acquisition challenge

For The Times and Sunday Times, the problem was a familiar one in the subscription media business. Most of the publication's digital content sits behind a paywall, meaning that acquiring new subscribers requires reaching people who do not yet know the product well enough to pay for it. The audience needs to be convinced, not just found.

According to the Reddit case study, The Times had already identified strong-performing content through its regular business-as-usual campaigns. The decision to layer Max campaigns on top of that existing activity - rather than replace it outright - reflects a measured approach. The goal was to diversify messaging and creative, extending reach to audiences that earlier campaigns had not captured.

Callum Chaplin, Performance Marketing Manager at The Times, described the rationale directly. "Having identified strong performing content in our BAU campaign, we then incorporated Max campaigns into our acquisition strategy, which has allowed us to diversify the messaging and creative," Chaplin said. "Being able to optimise content based on a variety of creative inputs in real time has allowed us to improve engagement and conversion rates by showcasing our content to untapped audiences on Reddit."

The targeting approach used was auto targeting, meaning The Times handed audience selection entirely to Reddit's algorithm. The campaign objective was conversion - specifically, driving subscription sign-ups.

The transparency argument

One of the more distinctive claims Reddit makes for Max campaigns is the concept of open-box reporting. Most automated campaign formats on major platforms - Google's Performance Max being the most discussed example - have attracted criticism for limiting visibility into how the algorithm allocates budget and selects audiences. Reddit's stated position is the opposite: that automation should produce more insight, not less.

Alongside standard performance reporting and cross-campaign creative asset data, Max campaigns introduce a feature called Top Audience Personas. This AI-generated taxonomy surfaces the most prevalent audience types driving campaign performance. Hughes' LinkedIn post included a screenshot of the feature showing persona labels such as "Leisure & Tech Mavens," "Diehard Enthusiasts," and "Tech & Finance Savvy," each accompanied by reach metrics and performance data. The feature was listed as launching "in coming weeks" at the time of the January 5 announcement, according to Reddit.

Cross-campaign creative reporting allows advertisers to identify which specific headlines and images perform best - and under which conditions - across multiple campaigns simultaneously. This level of asset-level transparency represents a deliberate product decision, one that Hughes acknowledged explicitly in his LinkedIn post: "At Reddit, Inc., we want advertisers to make better decisions with better data. That's why we're taking a different approach to automation: opening the black box."

Whether that transparency holds as the product scales beyond beta will be a key question for performance marketers evaluating the format.

What the LinkedIn response revealed

The Hughes post, published approximately four days before the current date based on the LinkedIn interface, generated a range of comments that illuminate how the advertising community is processing the announcement. Not all reactions were uncritical.

Dan Martin, identified as Head of Marketing, wrote: "Hopefully, this won't mirror Google and Meta's attempts to shift poor-performing inventory. That said, my experiences with Reddit ads suggest that they're significantly better value for money atm."

That comment captures the tension running through the automated advertising debate. Platforms that offer fully automated campaign types benefit financially when advertisers spend more. The concern that automation obscures poor inventory allocation - rather than eliminating it - is not hypothetical. It reflects documented advertiser experiences with Performance Max on Google and Advantage+ on Meta, both of which have faced scrutiny over transparency limitations. PPC Land has covered that debate extensively, noting that Reddit's implementation diverges from typical automation approaches specifically through its emphasis on reporting.

Another commenter noted: "Really want to try it, had a lot of fun with Reddit for Business campaigns, X, LinkedIn and Meta really need to move fast." A third wrote: "This would help us to plan campaign better." The sentiment across the thread suggested genuine interest tempered by healthy scepticism about whether Reddit can maintain differentiation on transparency as the product matures.

Technical constraints of the beta

Max campaigns in the current beta are limited to traffic and conversions objectives only. Campaigns targeting housing, employment, or credit categories are excluded. Display URL customisation is not available. Advertisers cannot modify the conversion optimisation window after campaign launch. Ad group setup is bypassed entirely - advertisers provide campaign-level targeting hints rather than configuring discrete audience segments.

These constraints matter for large advertisers with complex campaign architectures. An advertiser managing separate ad groups for different creative hypotheses, or one using granular bidding across multiple audience segments, will find Max campaigns fundamentally incompatible with that workflow. The format is designed for a different mode of operation: one where the advertiser provides inputs and constraints, then allows the system to determine execution.

The Brooks Running case from the same beta period illustrates the upside of that tradeoff. The footwear brand achieved 37% lower cost per click and 27% more clicks over 21 days, according to Reddit, while making zero manual campaign adjustments during that period. That result - gains without management intervention - is the core value proposition of the format.

Context: Reddit's advertising trajectory

The Times case study arrives during a period of rapid growth in Reddit's advertising business. The platform reported $726 million in total revenue for Q4 2025, announced February 5, 2026, representing 70% year-over-year growth. Advertising revenue specifically reached $690 million in that quarter, up 75% year-over-year. Daily Active Uniques stood at 121.4 million at the end of Q4, up 19%.

Max campaigns represent the latest in a sequence of product launches that Reddit has executed throughout the past 18 months. Dynamic Product Ads reached general availability in May 2025, delivering double the Return on Ad Spend in internal testing compared to standard conversion campaigns. Reddit launched its full Smartly integration on June 30, 2025, enabling multi-platform campaign management for advertisers already using that platform. Optimization scoring and personalized recommendations launched July 1, 2025, providing a 100-point account health metric inside Ads Manager. Interactive Ads launched in November 2025, enabling brands to build quizzes, countdown timers, and custom experiences within ad units.

The cumulative effect of these launches is a platform that has shifted from a niche social advertising option - historically associated with community engagement and upper-funnel objectives - toward a full-funnel performance advertising destination. The Max campaigns beta, and The Times case study specifically, is part of that repositioning.

Why this matters for media and subscription advertisers

The Times is not a typical Reddit advertiser. It is a premium publisher selling a premium product - quality journalism - to an audience that is, by definition, willing to pay for it. The fact that this profile of advertiser found meaningful results on Reddit is worth noting.

Reddit's user base has long been characterised by high engagement with text-based content and a tendency toward research-driven decision-making. PPC Land has tracked Reddit's positioning as the most cited source across major AI platforms, with 79% of Reddit users maintaining brand loyalty once product preferences are established, according to internal Reddit data. That community profile - intellectually engaged, research-oriented, resistant to superficial advertising - is also the profile of a reader likely to pay for quality journalism.

Whether that alignment is coincidence or structural advantage for subscription publishers testing the platform remains an open question. What the case study establishes is that at least one major news publisher found the audience quality sufficient to achieve double its prior conversion rate through automated delivery.

For performance marketers managing subscription acquisition campaigns on other social platforms, the 2x conversion rate figure will be difficult to ignore. Reddit's user base, with 116 million daily active users as of Q3 2025 and a documented tendency to engage deeply with content before making decisions, represents a different type of reach than the broad demographic targeting available on platforms with larger but more passive audiences.

Sam Hughes carries relevant background for this particular partnership. His LinkedIn profile shows that prior to joining Reddit in March 2021 - where he progressed from Client Partner to Senior Client Partner to his current role as Head of Industry - he spent a year in Brand Partnerships at News UK between September 2019 and September 2020. News UK is the parent company of The Times and Sunday Times. Hughes is therefore, in a direct sense, a former counterpart of the type of partnership team he is now pitching to.

The broader automated campaign landscape

The Max campaigns launch does not exist in isolation. Google Analytics 4 introduced native Reddit Ads cost data import in July 2025, enabling advertisers to automatically track Reddit spending within their Google Analytics interface for the first time. That integration - pulling 18 months of historical data - reduces the measurement friction that has historically complicated attribution for Reddit campaigns.

Across the industry, the trend toward AI-managed campaign formats is consistent. Amazon introduced its Ads Agent in November 2025. Meta's Advantage+ campaigns demonstrated 22% average ROAS improvements throughout 2025. Google's Performance Max remains the dominant automated format by scale. Reddit's entry into this competitive space with Max campaigns - backed now by a documented publisher case study - adds a fifth meaningful player to the automated social advertising category.

The differentiation argument Reddit is making rests on three claims: better transparency through open-box reporting, better audience quality through community intelligence, and competitive performance metrics through AI optimisation. The Times result supports the third claim. The Top Audience Personas feature, once fully launched, will begin to test the second. And ongoing advertiser scrutiny will determine whether the first holds as the format scales beyond its current beta.

Timeline

Summary

Who: The Times and Sunday Times, operating under News UK, working with Reddit's advertising platform. Sam Hughes, Sales and Go-To-Market Leader at Reddit and former News UK Brand Partnerships professional, announced the results via LinkedIn. Callum Chaplin, Performance Marketing Manager at The Times, provided the primary advertiser statement.

What: A Reddit Max campaigns beta case study showing that The Times achieved a 2x improvement in conversion rate and a 26% increase in click-through rate. Max campaigns is Reddit's fully automated advertising format, launched January 5, 2026, which uses AI to optimise bidding, targeting, and creative selection at the impression level, without requiring manual ad group configuration.

When: The Max campaigns beta launched January 5, 2026. The Times case study was published by Reddit for Business in early 2026 and amplified via Hughes' LinkedIn post approximately four days before March 21, 2026.

Where: The campaign ran on Reddit's advertising platform, targeting UK audiences. The case study was published on Reddit for Business. Hughes' LinkedIn post reached a broader advertising industry audience, generating 96 reactions, 5 comments, and 9 reposts.

Why: The Times was seeking new ways to grow digital subscriptions. With most content behind a paywall, reaching unconverted audiences efficiently is a core acquisition challenge. The Max campaigns format offered automated creative diversification and access to audiences the publication's prior campaigns had not reached, producing measurable improvements in both engagement and subscription conversion.

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