There are so many things wrong with your comment I don't know where to start.

>CN/Wired Digital is in business to make money, and it's clear that reddit's model isn't working.

Except that there was no investment to make Reddit more profitable. Arstechnica, Wired and Reddit are all owned by CN, not only does Ars and Wired have more employees (its understandable since they are in publishing business) but they also have _dedicated_ people, specifically hired to bring in advertising and do market research. Reddit traffic blows both Wired and Ars traffic out of the door, in every sense of the word. How much traffic per month specifically does Reddit get? Here is a snapshot from one of Reddit employees: http://i.imgur.com/mirir.jpg

But this is a problem not specific to Reddit. Ars also have money problems, they recently had to tighten their revenue generation by blocking ad blockers, presumably because they don't have enough revenue to keep current employees or even expand. To read more specific comments to my claim go through 2000+ comments with heavy involvement from Ars employees: http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/03/why-ad-blocking.... They always had Subscription, but only recently they started to heavily promote their subscription model, presumably because they can't get enough money.

> What's going to happen is that the donations will create a little bolus of cash -- not nearly enough -- and then run out of steam. Then the reddit guys are going to have to go back to the drawing board to figure out a long-term solution. This will probably be a subscription model that offers benefits that non-paying users don't get.

If you actually took the time to read the reddit blog post and the subsequent discussion on that subject you would have known that the whole purpose of that blog post was to generate conversation within the reddit community to see what they would more convenient with, which include discussions about having recurring paying model for customized option (including custom reddit email and other features). The whole idea was to generate conversation and see how many people are willing to pay if they try to go for a subscription model.

> This works better when you have content that people are willing to buy, but communities by users for users don't generally monetize that well, I don't think.

See also: Facebook, digg, fark,

> They could probably talk to Ars Technica about that, seeing as how they're also a CN property, and have nearly a decade's worth of experience in monetizing a dedicated community of users.

Ars is trying to save their own ass, as we speak.

> If they don't figure it out, reddit will go out of business. Conde Nast isn't in the business of subsidizing money-losing propositions, nor is any other company. And there's no reason they should be.

I think CN is run the same way as any big corporations are run. You can't monetize something you don't understand. CN is famous for print publication, and I think they are trying to apply the same logic on online publication.

There is something horribly wrong when Reddit has 4 employees and not self-sustaining; when digg has 60-80 employees and they are very much self sustaining and hiring more people at this very moment. Digg is not 20-times bigger than reddit.

Edit: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/co8n8/why_should_...