I seem to recall reading that Tew spent up to 20% of his targeted million dollars on PR[1]. Which would suggest that he had a very good understanding of page views being the important ingredient, a good story for traditional media being important (more so at the time) to get there, and more faith in what he was doing than anyone else that had the idea of creating a pure web page billboard.

[1]IIRC it was discussed in Paul Carr's Bringing Nothing to the Party, which isn't exactly complimentary about Tew