The first thing to know about Reddit is that it’s one of the world’s most popular websites. Globally, it sits 19th in the Alexa rankings; in the US, it sits seventh – ahead of Wikipedia. In the UK, where the company has just opened up its advertising offer, it is the number three site in the country, ahead of Amazon and even the BBC.
Despite this popularity the self-styled ‘front page of the internet’, and the company that sits behind it, hasn’t scaled similar financial heights to other social networks. In part, that’s because the more-than...