Current ads at Reddit are not that bad, it is nothing like youtube which is borderline unwatchable at the moment. But for Reddit general there is like lot of astroturfing currently and if Reddit could start capturing some value from that and same time show for regular user that this is commercial/pr account would be win-win for Reddit and regular users.
I would bet money that Reddit has the highest percentage of ad blocking users. Either by way of browser extension or third party apps. They just don't have enough impressions to cover the outlandish costs associated with running the site. Combined with lax content moderation policies, advertisers see more value going with third parties that can push a viral story about a product to the homepage.
There is no one problem with Reddit, and that is the problem. They have to reboot and build Facebook 2.0 (or whatever) without a highly fickle user base turning tail and running. Rock, meet hard place.
> There is no one problem with Reddit, and that is the problem.
Actually there is one singular problem ... money.
They could accept that "reddit the product" is a 2-5bn market cap business with solid 0.5bn revenue; staff up on that basis, scale their infrastructure on that basis, M&A on that basis, set investor expectations on that basis.
Reddit hosts its own ads, so seems like it would be relatively trivial to overcome the adblockers and insert them directly into the feed server side. Sure, that will piss a few people off, but more than this?
They could turn off video and image uploads and reduce server costs substantially. Remember when you couldn't directly upload a video to Reddit and everything was a link to YouTube, Vimeo, or Dailymotion?
