Given that the reason there were protest was that reddit wanted to monetize a part of their platform that was not generating ad revenue those two things could be completely related.

if reddit cannot monetize their users, either as a product to sell to advertisers or by converting them to paying customers it's might not be viable as a profitable business.

yeah, this seems like a mark to market change (the market just isn't paying as much as it used to) and is lagging by a few months. The impact of the blackout hasn't been quantified yet by investors and probably not even internally at this point.