I honestly believe that Reddit has ad targeting figured out in the form of subreddits. Second, Reddit had/has an opportunity to hear to actually dictate the ad

I honestly believe that Reddit has ad targeting figured out in the form of subreddits. Second, Reddit had/has an opportunity to hear to actually dictate the ad placement rules themselves. They don’t need to promise a certain number of placement, but rather a certain number of clicks. Finally, they could have made the ad API something that’s locked behind a human review until the app got popular enough. I agree that it’s simply not worth it to fully automate this. Realistically there’s less than 15 clients that would need to implement this.