I don't need to imagine, I've been in adtech for 12 years and built companies and sales teams. DaringFireball is 1 example of an extremely tiny minority that can earn that today after building up an audience and reputation for decades.

It doesn't just scale up linearly and getting to $10M is magnitudes more work, especially if they're going to place their own requirements on campaigns and creatives. Even buzzfeed went back to programmatic ads with layoffs because their custom articles didn't sustain the business.