If those outdated figures of ~$50k/month are true, I wonder if they could move to their own infrastructure or dedicated and turn some of those savings into getting from red to black.

Yes.

We operate a dozen of our own colos, with a virtual colo on AWS for insta-scalable multi-region redundancy, and an Amazon "colo" costs the same as about eight of our own when spun up and serving at least a gigabit of traffic.

However, the difference is less if you're going from zero sys admins to 24/7 says admins. I'd SWAG the crossover is once your AWS budget exceeds 4 full time sys admins willing to do shift work.

That wouldn't address the lack of a sustainable business model.

Being a forum where low wage/students/anti-corporate/anti-advertising types go and share memes is the elephant in the room problem.

Just because reddit has a lot of anticorporate types doesn't mean they don't also have a lot of pro-corporate types, too.

For example, I wouldn't be surprised if the Internet's largest right-wing community turned out to be one of the subreddits.

/r/all is the internet’s largest right-wing community, on any manner of subjects from race relations in America, to multiculturalism in Europe, to feminism and women’s rights anywhere. Last time I visited was around the Zimmerman verdict, and I couldn’t decide whether the conversation on reddit more closely resembled Free Republic or Stormfront—the major difference being that neither of those other right-wing communities can match redditors in their hatred and fear of women.