About r/place
On April Fools’ Day 2017, Reddit first introduced the world to r/Place: a five-day activation involving a collaborative digital canvas on which users can place a single tile every few minutes and work together to create art. r/Place was formed to examine what happens if you only let individuals make a small contribution at a time, so that they must work with others to build anything significant. What started as an April Fools’ experiment, quickly blossomed into millions of redditors working together to place colored tiles on a communal canvas, eventually evolving into a digital art piece.
Five years later, in 2022, we revived the beloved experiment to much fanfare. Countries, streamers, fandoms, and communities all staked their claim in r/Place’s revival. Similar to 2017, the final canvas quickly became something Internet legends are made of.
In 2023, we went for a threepeat, this time decoupling r/Place from its catalyst, April Fools’ Day…
Creative Strategy
Right place, wrong time
This year’s r/Place arrived at a critical time for the Reddit community. Updates to Reddit’s API stirred some of our most passionate users and finding the right time for r/Place to return proved to be a challenge – but hey, what better opportunity to offer a blank canvas to our communities than when our users are at their most passionate… right?
Our announcement video candidly acknowledged the delay in timing by flipping through other days we considered internally but didn’t feel right given the current climate, including April Fools’ Day (r/Place’s genesis), May the 4th (be with you), and June 23rd (Reddit’s birthday).
Down the rabbit hole
To announce the canvas was officially open, we created a custom video where our brand mascot, Snoo, pushes a mysterious button (an Easter egg reference to our 2015 April Fools’ Day experiment, r/thebutton), leading them down a pixelated rabbit hole of r/Place wonder.
This Alice in Wonderland metaphor aptly conveys what all avid r/Place fans know to be true – the experience is all-consuming, immersive, and, if only for a short while, allows your entire world to become a bit more 8-bit.
Daily time lapses
A key component of our social media success with r/Place 2022 was the sharing of time lapses. After the event concluded, our TikTok followers enjoyed reliving their favorite corner of the canvas. Using this insight as a strategy driver, we doubled down on nearly real-time canvas time lapses as a central pillar of our content marketing. We also expanded our efforts across even more platforms – including Reddit, YouTube, and, of course, TikTok – helping to build upon the urgency of r/Place’s ephemeral nature. These vignettes alone, which included both official end-of-day time lapses and deep cuts of different creations, generated 32.5M views on Reddit, 19M views on YouTube, and 68M views on TikTok.
Due to negative sentiment from some users over the API changes, “f**ck spez” (u/spez being Reddit CEO Steve Huffman) became a recurring character on this year’s canvas. Staying true to our community value of “keep Reddit real,” this message was allowed on the canvas and included in our official time-lapse content as well (much to the surprise and delight of our followers).
Global leaderboards
One of the most beautiful parts of r/Place is that anyone can participate from anywhere. As such, users from all over the world work together to create imagery and symbols, often related to their home country. In fact, national pride is a key theme across all three installments of r/Place with flags continuing to dominate the canvas year over year. To further gamify the r/Place experience, in 2023 we introduced global leaderboards into our content programming. These daily updates communicated which regions had the strongest presence on the canvas that day, further amping up the competitiveness. The leaderboards were a hit in r/Place, generating 36.8M views.
Snoo, out
Another hallmark of the r/Place experience is the turning of tiles to white, which signals the end of the experiment as the canvas gradually becomes a white abyss. To announce this transition to its final form, we proactively created an alternate version of our launch video.
This time, Snoo continues to fall down the rabbit hole, ultimately disappearing in the matrix for all of eternity (or until r/Place rises again).
Final canvas
The unveiling of the final canvas is one of the most thrilling parts of r/Place. A week’s worth of collaboration and rivalry comes together in one image, acting as a sort of time capsule of our current culture—internet, pop, and everything in between.
This year’s canvas included some usual suspects – including country flags, team logos, and TV characters – as well as some new ones (hi, spez).
Results
r/Place social content drove 218M organic impressions/views (a 172% increase from 2022’s campaign, which received 80M impressions). During the week of and days following r/Place (7/20-8/8), our social channels gained +270K followers (a 54% increase from 2022’s r/Place content, which attracted +175K followers). There were 56K social media mentions of r/Place in July with a 56% positive sentiment.