Are they a multibillion dollar corporation though? I know they have had crazy valuation's, but we are moving past a time of value based on eyeballs and to a time of value based on monetization. Where does the monetary value of reddit really lie? It seems like most of their creative monetization strategies like gold, donations and custom avatars have failed. This leaves the more mundane avenues of advertising to users, and selling the content that users creates. Both of those are severely handicapped by a free/low cost api. If they cannot monetize a user or their data then that user is bad for their bottom line.

reddit is doing this because their investors want them to be a multi-billion dollar company, not because they already are.