Individual donations, subscriptions, being treated as a goodwill or marketing expense by a company doing working in some tangentially related space (the way YCombinator keeps HN running), are some ideas free of the problems of advertising.
Here the core advertising-related problem is third party advertising. Were Reddit the co. to have some other business of their own that they advertised on Reddit in order to fund the site, there would still be ads, but they wouldn't interfere with the site itself. Here however, Reddit has to be neutered so that it appeals to generic advertisers - any content or communities that they, the third parties may find objectionable must go.
It's hard to a site as Reddit to pivot from the status quo to any of the more reasonable business models, because they were started with third-party advertisements in mind from the get go. The fatal disease was transmitted at birth, but it's only now that it closes on to the terminal stage. Once you get people used to free, it's hard to start charging money, and Reddit the company doesn't have any other business that could fund the site pro bono.
"Once you get people used to free, it's hard to start charging money"
You can leave your core offering free/ad-encumbered, but add additional services (ideally, replicate your complements)
For example, YouTube started off as free / ad sponsored, but look at the incredible revenue streams they have added:
• Patreon-like subscription model
• Merch integration with spring-tee
• Music / Premium / TV subscription <--- this is most likely the largest revenue stream after ads.
Now Reddit could be similar by adding:
• Paid feeds for sexual content (r/sexsells), trading, crypto, art, etc.
• Sponsored "TV mode" streams for major news / sports outlets
• Verified status subscription?
• Ability to post longer, Reddit hosted, videos behind a paywall with a preview.
I'm just spitballing ideas which certainly have their complexities and challenges, but free user-generated content is a great way to acquire users for fractions of a penny.
That userbase is reddit's competitive advantage when building any number of additional services.
Well, charging for it. Yes, they'd lose a big chunk of the userbase who value it a little bit but not really. But is it worth, say, $1/year to most users? Probably! And Reddit has 330 million users. Even if your conversion rate at that price is only 10% you should be able to run it for $33 million / year - it deals primarily with text, the software is relatively stable, it doesn't advertise. I suspect Reddit could be run very cheaply.
I think this is the wrong question; who cares what options Reddit has - what other options do the users have?
Reddit seems to be overplaying its hand, if they do then they'll get hit by the same obliviating exodus that others have been destroyed by in the past.
Ideally the next incarnation will be more decentralised in it's structure.
Every time Reddit bans one of the more cesspool-y subreddits there’s a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth and planned exoduses. The most popular alternative seems to be Voat, 8chan, or similar sites much more welcoming of violently racist (/r/chimpire, /r/coontown), political (/r/the_donald), misogynistic (/r/incel) rhetoric, or legally questionable/nonconsensual sexualization of teens (/r/jailbait, there was also a subreddit dedicated to nonconsensual pictures of women that I forget the name of), or other content that users feel they are being persecuted for sharing. While these sites struggle to find ways to find funding for site largely dedicated to sharing content much of society finds abhorrent, the bans do appear to have their intended effects of removing some of these distasteful people and rhetoric from the Reddit platform[0] with very minimal loss of users - and the users who are leaving were those who were originally propagating aforementioned material, so the loss isn’t very valuable. In the meantime, 8chan has cultivated a reputation for itself as an enclave for individuals looking to commit or celebrate mass murder.
Here the core advertising-related problem is third party advertising. Were Reddit the co. to have some other business of their own that they advertised on Reddit in order to fund the site, there would still be ads, but they wouldn't interfere with the site itself. Here however, Reddit has to be neutered so that it appeals to generic advertisers - any content or communities that they, the third parties may find objectionable must go.
It's hard to a site as Reddit to pivot from the status quo to any of the more reasonable business models, because they were started with third-party advertisements in mind from the get go. The fatal disease was transmitted at birth, but it's only now that it closes on to the terminal stage. Once you get people used to free, it's hard to start charging money, and Reddit the company doesn't have any other business that could fund the site pro bono.