If reddit had stuck to what it is good at: threaded, in-depth text conversations and links, it wouldn't need such a large amount of storage or bandwidth. Yes, I know that 1.7 billion users is a lot of text, but (1) there wouldn't be 1.7billion users if it were only text and links (2) the users who wouldn't be on reddit without multimedia offerings I am sure use a almost exclusively multimedia and account for the lions share.

Go back a few years, nix the 'let's host video and pictures and live chat and ignore every single thing the users are asking for so that we can bring in the eyeballs' idea and instead of that monetize the regulars using the their content and site's ability to guide google to it.

Keep 150,000,000 dedicated users who reliably generate valuable content for you and keep the site spam free for you, and all you have to do is keep some devs on hand to add tooling and site features that are useful. The caveat is that Stevey Huff has to live with one or two fewer commas on the balance in his bank account.

That 20gb dump doesn't include history afaik and probably doesn't include images and other multimedia.

I don't think it invalidates your point, but I just wanted to clarify.

> Reddit has 1.7 billion visits per month > […] > 4chan has 51 million visits per month[4],

This has an impact on their costs, but in an ad-driven business, it increases their revenues by as much.

> with an astronomical amount of persistent storage, with the content never being deleted

I'd like to know the actual amount of storage, but I really doubt it is actually “astronomical” (unlike Youtube).

Moreover, I suspect that the biggest part of that storage is actually video, which isn't really where the value (for the users at least) is.

Overall, if their costs are to high compare to other players their revenues, it's first and foremost a management and cost effectiveness issue, not a lack of revenues.