[candeira]

Some time ago I read that Andover.net/Geeknet made most of its money via ThinkGeek. It still didn't made the company any profit [1].

[1] - http://beta.fool.com/ddelony/2012/09/20/will-selling-slashdo...

But making profit off selling stuff is only half the challenge. As the sale of Slashdot to Dice Holdings illustrates, the Internet doesn't quite like cross-subsidies. That's what's undoing traditional media: in newspapers, the cartoon page attracted viewers and the real estate listings attracted paying advertisers, and between those the paper rag could pay for the foreign correspondents, or for the reporter at Town Hall. Now it's everyone for themselves, and some outlets make writers responsible for their own traffic, article per article. That's how we end up with listicles all over the place.

But I digress. Reddit has two challenges: one, make the profit off sales that it can't make off running The Front Page of the Internet. Two, maintain the cross-subsidy once the managers realise they have a profitable store weighed down by this money-losing forum, so hey, "couldn't we make more profit if we didn't have the forum?"