Any attempt at monetization through the "normal" means, such as increasing the number of ads or selling user data, would completely undermine the things that make Reddit such a valuable site. We've already seen a few examples of Reddit moving toward a more legitimate, financially viable social media model, and each one of those moves has been met with significant backlash. It seems that they're in a lose-lose situation: either run out of money to keep the site running, or lose all their users.
Reddit gold, the new Reddit platinum and bronze, they already show ads, redesign shows ads much more prominently. Literally dozens of ad trackers when you load their site.
Reddit is just as much of a profit driven company as Facebook or Twitter, I’m not sure why you’d think otherwise.
And I wholeheartedly wish Reddit will continue doing what they are doing. As a user, I would vote for scheduled maintenance downtime to many monetization attempts present on other networks.
The problem these sites have is that most of us don't particularly value using their service. We might appreciate the facility they offer for free, but what we truly value is the communities that are found there and the information and discussions that originate from those communities.
If Reddit died tomorrow, we'd all shrug and find somewhere else to talk, just like the countless forums we used before Reddit that are no longer with us. Such is the danger for any social media: if all you provide is a commodity platform, you're only ever as valuable as the community you can build and whatever that community is willing to contribute, and ultimately you have very little control over those things.
They don't make nearly as much as others with that traffic. Brand safety issues with subreddits and discussions, anonymous user profiles, poor mobile experience, mostly link aggregation instead of content, high adblocking, etc.
Each outbound link on reddit is tracked, similar to how Google tracks users clicking on SERPs. This can be tied back to a user to build profile on your interests, in addition to sub-reddits you subscribe to etc. which can be valuable if combined with other demographic data about you.
I dont know if they started selling this data directly. Last I spoke to ad people there, they had plans to build out their own tracking and analytics infrastructure, to improve things like geo-targeted ads, as their capabilities were lacking signficiantly.
