Reddit seems to me like a very hard product to monetize. As a daily user I get a ton of milage out of Reddit Enhancement Suite (desktop) and Apollo (iOS), in combination with typical ad-blockers. Combine that with the low friction of sign up (disposable e-mails allowed, no confirmation needed, sitewide bans rare) and the tacit allowance of "objectionable" content (porn, gore, hate speech, harassment, etc.)... you don't really have fertile ground for meaningful engagement from an advertiser perspective.

Not only that, but if Reddit were to strongly disallow any or all of the above we have seen how EASY it is to simply clone the tech and re-host. There have been stories about certain communities being exiled from Reddit only to spring up just as quickly elsewhere with more or less the same exact user experience...

The cost is fascinating. Is the value of a single place for all these conversations that much higher than having a bunch of independent forums scattered across the web? For users, there's a high discovery value... but at the cost of apparently far more expense running the site than has been able to be recouped yet.

Curious to see that even where centralization hasn't financially paid off, people are willing to keep tossing money at the dream of it paying off one day after 16 years.

It is strange. The obvious solution to Reddit's revenue problem was to build a marketplace into the foundation of the network, and they should have done that more than a decade ago.

Etsy, eBay, FB Market, Craigslist, Fiverr, OnlyFans (which was built-up by riding on social media propagation, taking advantage of services like Reddit), and 400 other various types of online markets. There's no reason Reddit could not have have built something substantial in the ecommerce platform space over the years. Taking a small cut from transactions would have eliminated their advertising dependency. Reddit's karma also lends itself easily to forming an ecommerce trust network via transaction feedback, which would form the backbone of buying and selling products or services on there. Reddit figured out to absorb image hosting away from eg Imgur (which also piggybacked off of Reddit to then form a competing social network), and they didn't figure out to do the same thing in the ecommerce space, despite how obvious it was.

Now that they are setting up Cryptocurrencies in some subreddits (donuts in r/ethtrader and a couple of others that I don't recall right now) they should experiment with reddits where you initially "pay" for posting, commenting, up/down voting. Then somehow if your post gets upvoted or is heavily commented on, you get some of those tokens (shared revenue) as well as moderators in the subreddits that adopt that dynamic.

It's akin to the "payment per Email" (hashcash as spam prevention) idea that a lot of us have yearned for a long time, which would deter spammers and make people think twice before commenting, so maybe it would increase the content quality.

It would be an interesting experiment.

Anonymity really hurts profits.

> Seems strange to me that a 16 year old company still isn't self sustaining.

Based on Reddit's own information, it would appear that they are.

Picking just one frontpage sub, /r/News, you can check the guilded page and see:

> gildings in this subreddit have paid for 142.83 years of server time

pics? 291.80 years.

funny? 364.09 years.

aww? 624.43 years.

askreddit? 724.03 years.

politics? 314.93 years.

That's 6 subs.

According to Reddit's own guildings report, 6 subs on Reddit have paid for a combined 2461.21 years worth of server time.

They're self sustaining. Reddit has bitten the 'growth at all costs' bug.

Well it's been multiple years and hn still needs multiple pages, ironic considering they claim to deal with the best people in tech. So I guess things take time?

Reddit's user base is poor and disaffected young men. Those might be valuable eyeballs to a warlord or a revolutionary but corporate America isn't buying.