Since its founding nine years ago, Reddit has stuck to its own weird guns.

The site, where users find, share and talk about Web links and photos, has been faithful to an antiquated design and still looks like an online message board plucked from the 1990s — think Craigslist, but with more Lolcats. You don’t need to hand over any personal data, not even an email address, to sign up and post or view an item. Discussions are often peppered with vulgar schoolyard humour.

And unlike many other Internet startups, Reddit has never fully embraced the dominant business model of selling advertising to support its free service.

But that is about to change.

The company is trying to jump-start its advertising business, as well as bolster some smaller money-making efforts. Its challenge is to figure out how to become a real business without changing the essential nature of the service and alienating its powerhouse constituency of 114 million intensely loyal monthly users.

If it fails, those users could revolt and ultimately depart en masse, turning Reddit into an also-ran like MySpace — another social Web giant that faded into obscurity.

“One of the things you have to be careful of when you have a site that’s 100 per cent 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.”

Reddit is moving slowly. The company already hosts a gift exchange, for instance, in which Reddit takes a cut of purchases made through participating vendors. There is also Reddit Gold, a premium membership program that users can purchase and award to one another.

As of last week, Reddit officially launched Reddit Live, in which multiple contributors can post updates to threads, and anyone watching gets sent those updates immediately without having to refresh.

“If we’re thinking this hard about the user experience, why can’t we try a little harder about the monetization?” said Alexis Ohanian, a Reddit founder and a member of its three-person board.

The main focus, though, is advertising, a small but growing effort. Links that grow popular on the site often drive a surge of traffic elsewhere online. The activity has caught the attention of brands eager to show ads to large, enthusiastic audiences.

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At the same time, Reddit’s distinctive culture may be a hard sell.