Is SO smaller business? Possible... just surprised.
He also sells three ad spots on his mostly weekly podcast for $6000 each. He’s a one man business grossing over 1 million a year without a sales team.
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.
1) He has a sales person that sells ads on his podcast: http://neat.fm
2) Extrapolating from published rates is not very reliable. Nobody except John Gruber and his accountant knows how many sponsors really pay the sticker price.
In my mind major respected operation like SO should have an easier job. I interpreted OP to imply "nobody is big enough to run bespoke ads".
I guess I don't have metrics for it and my impression that's clearly a more reliable investment of one's advertising dollars is a mistaken one :-/
I suspect there's a demand problem: while a bigger site might be better at gaining the attention of those buying non-network ads, there may not be a sufficient volume that is even considering buying ads in that market to support a larger site, and changing that takes either more or bigger sites than even SO.
Does it? If native ads were blocked less, couldn't these units reach more eyes than RTB trash?
Liquidity becomes an issue, which is why Reddit is a good example. They also use adzerk and built their own custom self-serve ad network but they make very little money compared to similar traffic using standard programmatic demand.
