She did say: “I didn’t want to be taking ad revenue from legitimate advertisers, so I only briefly activated advertisements from the partners to see what surfaced and to take a few screenshots.”

Including hosting? I'm sure it's actually in red.

If you include the hit to your professional reputation from actually plagiarizing a news site for revenue and getting blacklisted from the industry, then what did it cost? Everything.

Or you get placed as a cto with a fat raise.

My dream job.

I'm not. I knew a developer who, in his spare time, developed a clever scraper. He scraped the top stories and results from Google, then scraped similar content based on Google's own ranking, then submitted that content to his own aggregator sites (all resolving to the same server). He ran ads on it. He got plenty of traffic and was net <$500/month in 2006.

It's not that expensive to run a site and the right advertising partners (cough Taboola cough) pay nicely.