What the hell does a site like Reddit do with almost half a billion dollars?! That's insane.
As a mod, they've put a lot of work recently into flagging trolls and astroturf accounts, and still have a lot of work to do. I run r/sanfrancisco, and wow there's a ton of bots and trolls flooding our sub about the Newsom recall.
They also seem to really want to find a way to monetize content in a new way. They've flirted with crypto and awards, but I imagine they have strong ambitions around how they can reward creators and moderators in a healthy, non-ad-based-way. (Their ads are the worst of all the big social networks, given how anonymous their base is. So they're forced to innovate, which I think is good for everyone.)
Plus the usual suspects (infrastructure, traditional demand gen marketing, paid moderation, etc).
The oddity is that their user's aren't that anonymous -- in fact, they very directly tell reddit what their interests are. Like a trade magazine, reddit really doesn't have to do any analysis at all to figure out how to map ads to the right target audience.
It confounds me how they haven't managed to do a much better job of targeted advertising -- just showing woodworking tool ads on the woodworking sub would be a dramatic improvement over the current setup.
However, ads at other social networks have evolved way past this level of targeting (which is a bad thing, in my opinion, but alas). Social networks like Facebook know so much about not just your likes but the people you're friends with and how much your income is and what stores you've been to and what you do on Instagram and what your age is and what state you're in and... the list goes on.
I think most subreddits are tough to monetize. What do you sell to r/funny or r/politics or r/sanfrancisco? What does r/choosingbeggars want to buy? There's a few obvious ones (diets, hobbies), but I think eeking out $100M from that is already impressive.
Plus, Reddit's audience is way more against ads than Instgram/Facebook/etc.
So let's say their annual revenue is 3-4x since ad spend is usually weighted heavily towards Q4. At 300-400M per year and growing that's actually pretty solid.
Reddit is the only website in the Alexa top 15 (US) that runs completely on the cloud. Everyone else has figured out datacenters save a bucket load of money.
The endless crime-posting is exhausting, it is rapidly turning into nextdoor.