They couldn’t make a profit when the engagement was generally happening in good faith. I doubt they’ll be able to convert this bad faith engagement into anything of value. It’s just a web app where you can change pixels, do they even have ads on there, let alone ones that won’t be blocked by all the users using ad blockers?

I mean, it is hard to tell what their goal was in even starting this. The results should have been very predictable. Maybe they were just trying anything they could think of out of desperation, or maybe the whole idea was to get a good idea of what people think of them and if there was a silent majority that didn’t care about the third party app drama but would engage sufficiently to drown out the spez hate at least a bit.

But this should have been predictable because even the very first r/place ended up dominated by automation tools, which are used by people looking for a custom experience rather than an official one.

I think the whole “any engagement = profit potential” is the mindset that got Reddit into this mess in the first place. Though maybe more on the angle of “the admins realized they needed to show evidence of that or even realize it for a successful IPO”.