Totally agree. I've worked with so many traditional and new media projects that base their plan on some magic advertising numbers that some magical awesome sales team is going to make happen. Projections are almost always an order of magnitude off towards the optimistic. It's very hard to make a strong and steady revenue stream based on advertising. - Paul Reynolds

The problem is that you need so many properties running in tangent to get a strong revenue stream from ads, and each of these properties need to be incrementally cheaper to run. That's why ad networks work out so well (in general). - Steve Spalding