I don't think the average Reddit user knows what an ad blocker is these days? I wouldn't feel guilty blocking their ads? I have a feeling they are making a lot of money?
People can buy gold (a month of "reddit premium") to thank others for their contributions. In October 2013, they launched the "reddit daily gold goal" bar that displays how much gold is needed every day to pay for all (server?) costs (http://www.redditblog.com/2013/10/thanks-for-gold.html). I don't know if it includes other costs or just server costs actually. I've looked for some statistics over time to see whether the goal is being reached often or not but I can't find a graph.
They've got a couple other revenue sources like merchandising and their own advertisement system. But it would seem Reddit is not a massively profitable business at this point.
I am not 100% convinced that they will ever (officially) be profitable (or that they would need to be).
There is a lot of corporate crap that makes the front page, I expect that reddit receives remuneration for this. e.g. there was a front page post recently of a TacoBell sign that was 20 years old, a crap post with little value, but it ends up with +2000 votes and is front paged on a friday(i think). What do you think that sort of exposure is worth to Tacobell? If Tacobell did pay for some product placement of this nature do you think reddit would ever tell its users? Nope, that would pretty much kill any future attempt to do this sort of thing.
Whether the Tacobell payment is official or hidden by way of increased ad costs on other CondeNest properties or even if it is offered as a sort of add-on to their usual advertising in print media. Reddit is selling their front page one way or another becuase it is pretty much their cash cow, however milking it must be done very carefully because a user backlash would kill the site or future opportunities to monetise in this manner.
That's just speculation though. It could be happening, sure, but that sounds very risky, and doesn't pass Occam's razor as far as I'm concerned. On Twitter, time and time again, some people will retweet / fav corporate stuff because it's funny or makes them feel good / outraged / etc. Some people love to associate with or promote a brand they like.
Maybe Taco Bell puts a lot of work in creating content that works well on the Reddit frontpage (which would definitely be manipulative, but hey, what are you gonna do), and maybe their own employees at home are upvoting it ("it's for the good of the company"), but I very much doubt the top people at Reddit are making a business out of this, if only because they couldn't justify it to their employees.
It just seems more likely to me that 1) a lot of material is organically upvoted, and it includes corporate stuff from well-known compagnies because a lot of people relate to them 2) some companies are (trying to) game the system in various ways that violate the spirit but not the letter 3) Reddit is trying to extract profit from all that but isn't being very aggressive about it because they don't have very high operating costs, are VC-backed and they'd rather find something that's compatible with the spirit of the platform and sustainable in the long run.
> There is a lot of corporate crap that makes the front page, I expect that reddit receives remuneration for this.
That's almost certainly false. Even if you believe the people running Reddit have no morals, the money from promoting Taco Bell can't possibly be close to enough to the legal and business risk to getting caught.
