Your premise is largely wrong, at least from my experience as an advertiser. They have two main problems: 1) huge amount of adult/offensive/drug related etc tr

Your premise is largely wrong, at least from my experience as an advertiser. They have two main problems: 1) huge amount of adult/offensive/drug related etc traffic that most mainstream advertisers/adsense etc don't want. 2) antiquated ad infrastructure/targeting options. The biggest problem: you have only two targeting options. a) no targeting at all - just random traffic ($20/day). b) buy space at the top of a specific reddit ($30/day). b) is obviously going to be preferable for every single advertiser given how different each community is, but very few reddits have enough traffic to justify it. Nobody is going to pay $30/day to advertise on a subreddit with 5k subscribers, for instance. Simply putting a PM, a few devs and a few sales reps full-time on it should work wonders. Hell, if they just gave the option to buy CPM ads targeted by subreddit, with no minimum spend per subreddit, it would be a vast improvement.