It was inevitable that these companies would eventually find themselves at this juncture. “There is an Internet strategy, which is audience and growth first, business model second,” said David Pakman, a partner at Venrock, a venture capital firm that invests in technology companies. “Because of that ordering, the challenges that the pursuit of a business model presents manifest themselves later in life.”

Gawker and Reddit are very different businesses, in terms of both mission and scale. One is a modest-size provider of editorial content, the other an online message board with 170 million regular monthly users. But the two companies were created within a few years of each other: Gawker in 2002, Reddit in 2005.

More to the point, both were products of the Internet’s freewheeling ethos. And both have amply shown what happens when this ethos is taken to its logical extreme, whether it is Redditors’ posting of revenge porn on the site’s message boards or Gawker’s humiliating a relatively unknown media executive.

It is one thing to engage in this sort of behavior when you are focused mainly on enlarging your audience or user base. But the calculus changes when you start worrying about alienating advertisers, too.

Attracting traffic is a more straightforward proposition than increasing revenue, especially for companies like Gawker and Reddit, whose identities are bound up with pushing the boundaries of good taste.

Ellen Pao, who recently resigned as chief executive of Reddit after the community turned against her — she called it “one of the largest trolling attacks in history” — described the challenge in an op-ed article for The Washington Post.

“A large portion of the Internet audience enjoys edgy content and the behavior of the more extreme users; it wants to see the bad with the good, so it becomes harder to get rid of the ugly,” she wrote. “But to attract more mainstream audiences and bring in the big-budget advertisers, you must hide or remove the ugly.”