Big brands don't want to be advertised on r/watchpeopledie but probably have no issue with being advertised on r/relationshipadvice which is almost entirely a sub about controversy and thus drives clicks and revenue.
I've done some searching and it seems that reddit gold is a pretty small piece of the reddit revenue. Campaigns start at $50,000 with Reddit Ad's.
That's pretty old data. And I realize I said Gold when what I meant was Reddit Coins, ie. the currency that lets people gild posts with various things like flames, and other colors.
I'm deeply interesting in learning what % of revenue that is for them and how quickly it is growing.
A recent heavily awarded post was broken down by cost per award. The money spent to award that post what it got was over $24,000, and that was just in the new award types and not the older medal/coin types. Adding the latter in pushed the total to just under $36k for that single post.
As for advertising on Reddit, I view it as a fool's errand on the part of advertisers given the extensive popularity of PiHoles and adblocking software among the userbase.
Do you have a link to that breakdown? I'd love to dig in further. I suspect that there's a lot of Coins in circulation from Reddit seeding the system. The marginal cost to them is roughly $0. Without being able to confirm if users paid the list price for those awards, I'm not sure we can confidently say Reddit banked ~$36k revenue for that post.
That said, my concern is that it creates an environment for misaligned incentives. If say, hostile foreign governments have their troll farms buying awards to increase visibility of divisive and inflammatory posts in key threads, that furthers their agenda and creates a revenue stream for Reddit that is fueled by creating an environment where that flourishes.
I'm NOT saying Reddit is actively trying to do this as I think they'd be horrified to find this happening, but they have a fine line to walk here from a product and business standpoint.
Re: your other point, I do digital advertising for a living. I can assure you that the vast majority of users on Reddit are not using PiHoles. While many may be using ad blockers, those largely don't work for native ads in the mobile app.
I've done some searching and it seems that reddit gold is a pretty small piece of the reddit revenue. Campaigns start at $50,000 with Reddit Ad's.