Reddit had ads before the acquisition, it's just they ran infrequently enough that most users never noticed them.

Economic theories tend to neglect considerations like people's self-destructive behavior; or they re-define it to make the theory work ("it's not a bug, it's a feature!"). The classic example is of a destructive drug habit.

The addictive element creates a larger user base, but its value is highly debatable: EverQuest was nicknamed EverCrack and World of Warcraft is similar; addictive elements also play into gambling sites, collectible card games, instant messaging, and even sites like Reddit. Anything that sucks up your attention and wastes your time is a net liability. Television sitcoms create the "value" of watching someone else's fake life by withdrawing your attention from your own, real one. (And it initiates a cycle, as the more you watch, the less of a real life you have, the more you'll turn to the comforting artificial alternatives.)

Thus, I don't subscribe to the idea that merely because people are using something, it must have value for them. It has value for the purveyor of the service or substance; and due to corporate self-interest, that is often confused in business with value for the user.

If lacing a drug with plutonium made it a hundred times more addictive, most corporations would have no problem selling radioactive crack (and killing off all their users), as long as it made the numbers work for this quarter.

If life is made torturous so that selling an anesthetic is big business, claiming it "creates value" is begging the question in accepting that life should be like that in the first place. Almost all mass media, including sports, and including the aforementioned addictive games and services, are forms of anesthesia.

The real value would be stopping the death by a thousand cuts, not anesthetizing ourselves to it.