Reddit, an entertainment, social and news site based in San Francisco, Calif., is cautiously entering the advertising business while taking care not to alienate loyal users.

The site, which has been home to users that find, talk about and share links and photos on the Internet, has stuck to its old design and still looks like a message board from the 90's, according to the New York Times. The site doesn't even require subscribers to input an email address or any personal information while signing up.

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The page has never fully accepted selling advertisements as the ruling business model of internet-based businesses to support itself.

However, the people at Reddit are determined to eventually change.

The company is trying to strengthen moneymaking efforts on top of its proposed advertising business. The hard part of the endeavor is figuring out how to become an earning venture without losing the essence of the site and distancing itself from the 114 million loyal monthly users  of the service.

If the change is too sudden or too drastic, the "Redditors" that call the site home can stop traffic to the page altogether and leave Reddit to be left alone like numerous dot-coms of the 90's.

"One of the things you have to be careful of when you have a site that's 100 percent community-driven is how best to support that community and not make them feel like you've sold out," said Kevin Rose, general partner at the venture capital firm Google Ventures. "You just don't want that community to blow up on you."

Rose had co-founded a link-sharing site alike to Reddit called Digg in 2004. Rose's site was immensely popular in its time, receiving millions of visitors when its popularity peaked. However, a manipulation of the site's design and advertising strategy led its users to leave Digg in the dust.

Reddit is trying to avoid what happened to Digg and is proceeding gradually. Users, for example, can buy into Reddit Gold, a premium membership program with extra features to make the client's experience on the site better.

The strategy in advertising is dependent on using the site's gross layout. Reddit also hosts subtopics, or "sub-Reddits," which are generally geared to particular subjects. Currently, there are roughly 7,000 active sub-Reddits, some of which can be used to publicize products.

For example, there is sub-Reddit that hosts information on beauty tips and products. The visitors and regulars of the site post hundreds of threads daily, frequently endorsing merchandise among themselves. Word-of-mouth advertising may be utilized by such companies as Estée Lauder which specializes in manufacturing skincare and hair products.

However, Reddit's feature of maintaining users' anonymity may prove to be the opposite of what advertisers would want. Many big brands are buying ads from sites Facebook and Google that compile information about individual users in order to deliver targeted ads.

"So Reddit is eventually going to change," Yishin Wong, the company's chief executive, wrote in a recent Reddit post. "Our goal is to make it change that you like, like when you go back to a mall you really liked when you were a kid and find that it's become really awesome." 

TagsReddit, advertising, Advertisements, money