That is amazing. While Facebook has reached world domination and died again (spawning an empire and catapulting its owner to be one of the world's richest people), Reddit still seems to be slugging around in the "we have something, maybe we can monetize it idk" phase.
While admire that CN is not squeezing them to death, it appears like Reddit is vastly under-managed.
The reddit audience was historically very resistant to advertising. When it began it really wasn't a million miles away from the HN audience, could you imagine the drama we'd have here on HN if suddenly banner ads started appearing?
Reddit grew to the point where its audience is now a lot more broad and the previous audience is a vocal minority. They can get away with ramping up ads and other behaviour because the audience is no longer sufficiently monolithic to revolt.
Bearing in mind in the past the audience did revolt and basically kicked out the then CEO (temporary CEO but still...) Ellen Pao, in what was a kind of full scale riot that shut most of the site.
The ads are already happening all over HN. Don't you see the jobs posting for YC companies?
Remember that YC is an investment company. They certainly made billions of dollars through the companies they funded, that were in part thanks to HN.
Every time you send a direct job application to a HN company, that's 20% of your yearly salary staying in the company instead of going to recruiter fees. That's the hell of a revenue per click.
Yes, they've always been there since the beginning of HN that's in large part why nobody cares. I am talking about the kind of advertising for random crap that turns up on other websites, HN doesn't need to do that because frankly HN isn't that big (compared to reddit) and has deep pockets.
Reddit was a like a bridge between old-school vBulletin forums and nascent 'social media' when it launched; it explains why a lot of newer users find its UI hard to deal with. It never even seemed like they cared about revenue, because they didn't mess with API access for third party app developers, and didn't even have a responsive website until relatively recently.
CN spun reddit off as independent company in 2012, though afaik CN’s parent company is still the majority shareholder. They have Sam Altman, Marc Andersen, Peter Theil, Jared Leto and Snoop Dogg as investors (the usual suspects basically).
EDIT: My how time flies. It was bought by CN in 2006!