I think they're wrong. I was building a product search app using the reddit api, but with their API pricing it isn't remotely feasible financially so I shuttered it. They may see $$$$ but I suspect they'll find very few takers.

Yes, the data is valuable for product recommendations, but not at the price they are asking. And if they ever block traditional scraping then all those "append reddit to google" searches will be gone too. Google is not going to pay them either.