Mike Isaac explains:

Reddit is one of the biggest sites on the Web. Now it just needs to start making it rain.

Since 2005, the online community message board and link-sharing site has risen from an esoteric bulletin board service to the self-proclaimed “front page of the Internet,” boasting nearly 112 million unique visits and 5.4 billion page views per month. Its traffic-driving oomph is so powerful, Reddit often takes down sites that make its front page (also known as the Reddit Hug of Death).

The problem is, despite its massive traffic and Internet popularity, Reddit isn’t the money-making machine it wants to be. Reddit won’t disclose its revenue, but as of last year it’s not a profitable site, and most of its ad products are still largely experimental.

That won’t be the case forever. The company has charged Jena Donlin and Ellen Pao with the task of turning the popular site into a successful business.

Among other things, Donlin and Pao (who previously worked at Kleiner Perkins as a venture capitalist) work on partnerships with outside brands and potential advertisers, while playing around with how to grow some of the site’s more nascent revenue streams.

That’s not an easy feat. The Reddit community has long been critical of traditional Web advertising, and the company’s long, complicated history with part owner Conde Nast has only served to make monetization efforts that much more difficult.

Reddit has three main ways to monetize right now: ads, "Reddit gold", and e-commerce.

The rest of the article has a great interview with Jena Donlin and Ellen Pao.

Read more about Reddit's plans to monetize:

http://recode.net/2014/04/08/reddit-execs-ellen-pao-and-jena-donlin-get-serious-about-the-sites-business-qa/