I know it's a larger scale, but if an indy podcast developer can develop his own ad platform just for his application does it really take that large of a team?
Selling and serving ads takes a lot of work. I worked at a 50ish person company, and we had 3 people working full time on selling ads, along with my 4 person product/engineering team who probably spent about 50% of our time working on our ads platform/integrating with other company's platforms. There's a lot of complexity in this space, especially when trying to optimize for a global market and making sure you keep customers happy.
