In hindsight it's easy to say, but I bet they would be extremely profitable if they had taken less VC funding and kept self-hosting of content to the minimum. S

In hindsight it's easy to say, but I bet they would be extremely profitable if they had taken less VC funding and kept self-hosting of content to the minimum. Serve a few ads here and there, let companies do their guerilla marketing for a "small donation" and have people pay for their Reddit gold. But that probably wouldn't put them on track for a few billion dollar IPO, so of course you can't do it.