Note that this is essentially the same as facebook’s policy: they did not sell the user data as part of their advertisement business. It was an app that siphoned up user data without Facebook being paid.
A lot of reddit data is actually far more accessible via the API or the public data dump, which is on BigQuery. What makes the data less useful is the comparative anonymity because reddit users tend to use pseudonyms, and the fact that you can’t target users after building a targeting model from scraped data.
You could still trawl the reddit data to find useful correlations, and maybe get a good deal on ads if you notice the overlap of /r/the_donald with /r/bedwetting or whatever.
As someone who's done exactly that with the Reddit data (http://minimaxir.com/2016/06/reddit-related-subreddits/), posts/comments aren't as useful for intent as you note. The valuable Reddit data is the nonpublic views/subscription/upvote/downvote behavior.
A lot of reddit data is actually far more accessible via the API or the public data dump, which is on BigQuery. What makes the data less useful is the comparative anonymity because reddit users tend to use pseudonyms, and the fact that you can’t target users after building a targeting model from scraped data.
You could still trawl the reddit data to find useful correlations, and maybe get a good deal on ads if you notice the overlap of /r/the_donald with /r/bedwetting or whatever.