1. Go to reddit.com

2. Refresh the page 25 times

3. After every page load note down what type of item you see in the advert place (of these 3 types):

- (a) Goodwill notice (eg: "thanks for not blocking our adverts", "try reddit gold!", a cutesy flash game)
- (b) reddit community advert (eg: visit our subreddit!)
- (c) proper advert (eg: "buy starcraft for $40", "watch looper on netflix!")

Here are my results:

a a a a a a a a a a b a b a a a a a b a a b b a a

The goodwill notices are things reddit are displaying themselves, so they generate no revenue. The community adverts are I think currently free due to some sort of promotion, but when they're not free they're a couple of $ through the self serve platform. The proper adverts are... well, I didn't see a single one!

I've just viewed 25 pages and I have not once been monetised. If you view any other website that makes money through advertisements you'll have AT LEAST one or two monetised adverts per page, often more. Here's a website the company I work for runs: http://www.minecraftwiki.net every page load has at least 3 adverts. If you visit our website 25 times you've viewed ~75 monetised adverts, if you view reddit.com you see ~0 monetised adverts.

The problem reddit has is that the community is against adverts, people love reddit because it's not part of the terrible money making internet, they see it as a warm lovable place they can go and be safe from the big bad advertisers and they know when reddit does have paid-for advertisements they're going to be good quality. This is obviously not a good revenue strategy though.

Reddit wouldn't have a problem bringing in revenue if they held themselves to the same standards as the rest of the internet, but they don't, they hold themselves to really really really high standards and have backed themselves into a really shitty corner where they either get money through paid subscriptions, get money through really good quality adverts that users are comfortable with (but are rare) or hope they can scrape by on the single nice advert that might display on one page in every... 100, because that won't upset the users.

Personally I think they're going to have to eventually accept that yes, it's really good to be the one final website on the internet that really does care about their users, but it's not a maintainable business strategy and what matters most to users is not that they don't have to see adverts, it's that the website they have invested their time, energy and care into is going to be there tomorrow.

I think it's comparable to the instagram situation. instagram considered monetising in a way that upset users; reddit fears they will end up doing exactly the same and it isn't just a fear of the users reactions, it's how they want reddit to be. I think it was about 3 years ago that an advertiser sneaked a rogue advert onto reddit through their ad network (it caused some dumb pop-up thing to display, if I recall correctly) and explaining the reddit reaction as "vocal reddit users went ape-shit" would be a gross understatement.

Summary: reddit (as a company) holds itself to standards that are way above the rest of the internet, reddit users love this but it's detrimental to the finances of reddit. reddit could throw in the towel tomorrow and become just like the rest of the internet and they would make money. (obviously doing this would potentially alienate users, which is the downside, I don't believe that this would be bad enough for users to actually leave and is not comparable to the digg situation, but generating ill feelings amongst the reddit community even if they don't leave is still bad)