I suspect that the vast majority of Redditors use Ad-block or equivalent. Reddit might get millions of page views, but if that doesn;t translate into ad-impressions then they are effectively invisible to the money-people.
Even in the post they once again pander to the privacy freak out crowd by noting that google analytics include some js.
Someone commented that it was nice that they mentioned this, and the author responded with "We know our customers well!"
Sorry but that's ridiculous. Reddit is hard to monetize because it's full of anti consumerist adblock js-blocking privacy freaks.... And they seem to be encouraging it in their users.
Apart from the hardcore privacy crowd you would think they best way to advertise to these people is through text based targeted advertising. You have a mountain of comment data their to run algorithms across to decide which ads are most effective for each user.
That'd work well. As long as you make it seem like they aren't adverts. Some people just hate ads and will not click on them, even if they're the most useful tailored special offer you can imagine.
Look, I didn't want to be blunt for obvious reasons, but now that you ask, I will give you a hint.
The reddit crowd is not exactly advertising friendly. What we got was direct human traffic, and 92% of them were blocking javascript. The only bots we saw were the first 10 hits, most of them familiar from our twitter links; shave 2% for the bots, that still leaves you with 90% of the traffic that's worthless.
The reddit staff are aware of this; why else would they thank you for not using a NoScript or ad-block whenever you visit the site with js enabled?
This logic would also apply to other tech blog and generally tech sites with tech-savvy users. Most of them, including Wired, Ars, Digg, slashdot are doing just fine.
Digg has their own marketing/advertising team, unlike reddit. I think this makes the difference.
Digg is also smart about actually selling and placing ads compared to reddit. I've been checking out digg for the first time in years the last few days, and I was somewhat surprised to find that I actually kind of like the way digg does interstitial ads.
Reddit has one header ad and a couple of sidebar ads that are self-advertising more often than not.
(I will note for the record that this ad[1] spotted earlier today got a good laugh out of me. Somebody has used reddit's self-serve advertising to its fullest potential).
And not all forms of ads are blocked out by AdBlock type plugins/addons by default either, just the most onerous ones and those people can be bothered to manually add.
Even if most Reddit users did block ads, and as noted in another comment it's actually about 30%, reddit has other ways of displaying ads. Their "upcoming stories" box occasionally displays "sponsored links". There are other things that reddit could do to get a sponsor's message to adblock users that would be similarly non-invasive (contests, etc.), too.
Reddit could offer up an analysis of their own server logs to give raw numbers, with some reasoned math to translate that to what they consider unique visitors. Not really independently verifiable, but would be food for thought. (We're already trusting the Google Analytics screenshot to be essentially unmodified.)
