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Brings to mind an article I read circa 2001 where a Google executive said, "Look, we could be profitable next month if we covered the site with annoying ads, but we're not going to do that. We're focusing on growth now."

Worked out okay for their investors.

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Google was still a fairly young company at that point. Reddit is 12 years old and had a $1.6B valuation prior to this $200M infusion. They've already achieved growth.

I think the investors' motivations are non-financial, akin to how YC invested in Quora.

Search results pages turn out to be the most valuable possible place to put ads.

Reddit might not be nearly so.

Then again Facebook initially seemed like it would have that problem but they seem to have overcome it.

But what if Reddit, which has tons of great content, blocks access to Google search, focuses on building a really good search engine, and strongly marketing it via sharing search results in their platform, could this become popular ?

And while $200M doesn't fit a design change, search engines are expensive.

If it were that simple Facebook would have tried it by now.

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