Reddit Sets Its Sights on Turning a Profit, Boosted by Targeted Ads, Data Licensing

My prediction:

It'll reach a profitability peak some months from now, then start dropping again. That drop will prompt Reddit Inc. to introduce further changes to the platform, and they'll get a new profitability peak - smaller than the older one. This pattern will repeat a few times, until the focus is back from "maximising profits" to "cut down the losses".

Investors will be pissed and try to find someone to blame, potentially even suing Greedy Pigboy - seeking to get their money back, as the amount that they invested in the platform became nothing. This will fail, but Greedy Pigboy's reputation will be ruined among investors, just like it is among users.

In the meantime, users will flee in flocks from the platform. Most of them will go to Discord, with only a handful hitting Lemmy - as by now Lemmy already has its own culture aside from the one of the "leftover" in Reddit. (I expect that "fuck off back to Reddit" will become a common scene here.)

In the meantime, it'll be an open secret that the very changes promoting short-term net profit caused long-term losses. Because it'll be stuff like:

Targetted ads further encouraging users to use ad blockers, and to avoid the app altogether.
Disruption of the mobile site to "encourage" users to use the app. Some will use it for a while, then ditch it altogether.
Making ads less and less distinguishable from genuine content. You click it once by accident, get pissed but give Reddit some money; you do it twice, and you leave.
Removing features only used by a small fraction of the userbase - but the fraction differs each time, so users in general get pissed.
Removing the ability to customise the old.reddit page of each subreddit with CSS, under some bullshit claim like "someone might abuse it, think on the children!", but the actual reason will be brand awareness.
Introducing changes that, while desirable for larger subreddits, either neglect or outright harm smaller subreddits. Even if the main reason why people stay in Reddit is the smaller subs.
Copying features from social media platforms strictu sensu. That'll promote Reddit in the short term, but in the long term it becomes pointless to stay in Reddit instead of a bigger platform (like Facebook).

Interesting prediction
To be fair, I wiped out the custom CSS with RES when I was on there.

Couldn't stand every subreddit thinking it was cute to change random styling for no reason. It was like the old custom myspace page days.
- It's fine if the user actively chooses between the sub's style, the site's style, or even a custom personal style. However, I think that it's important for communities to have at least some room to customise their own look-and-feel - it delivers the point better, that Reddit is supposed to be an aggregate of communities, not some huge monolithic community on its own.
  
  And custom CSS in special was the target of protests, as Reddit already tried to remove it.

Reddit narrowed its net loss during the second quarter to $10.1 million, from $41.1 million a year earlier. Revenue, meanwhile, climbed 54%, to $281.2 million. Analysts expect the company to turn a quarterly profit in the next year or so, boosted by more targeted advertising, as well as revenue from data-licensing agreements with companies including Google and OpenAI.