A hundred engineers for a site like Reddit is ridiculous. Scale is not an excuse - WhatsApp being the famous example of a hyperscaled product with many native clients and only a few dozen engineers. And who would Reddit be selling to? Are they going to run their own in-house ad platform?
I'm sure Reddit justifies it to themselves somehow.
Reddit provides a pretty large amount of features (once you include advertising, moderator features, subreddit customization, image hosting, etc.) while WhatsApp provided a very small number of features. As a note, Reddit is already running their own in house ad platform and have been for a while.
I'm sure Reddit justifies it to themselves somehow.