I don't think you're argument is wrong overall, but I think your math is orders of magnitude wrong. 0.15c/page is a $1.50 CPM rate, and that's really is pretty

I don't think you're argument is wrong overall, but I think your math is orders of magnitude wrong. 0.15c/page is a $1.50 CPM rate, and that's really is pretty low, for the web and premium publishers in particular, your math puts Gawker at $35 CPM, however I think your math is off by about a factor of by about a factor of 2-3. Some quick googling will show the Gawker advertising revenue number is actually $30m; $15m being from ecommerce/licensing + native advertising/sponsored content. I'm not sure where you pulled 1.3bn/yr from, but at $30m in revenue that would assume Gawker is obtaining CPMs of $23 for all of it's advertising. $23 CPMs are real: in video advertising, but they are totally out of whack for display, even premium display is only commanding about half that: http://www.mediafuse.com/resources/a-guide-to-cpm-rates http://www.mediafuse.com/resources/a-guide-to-cpm-rates I don't know what CPMs Gawker is actually getting, but I think that it's likely that your traffic estimate is probably off by quite a bit since 3rd party traffic estimates are notorious for undercounting traffic. So, Gawker probably wouldn't be excited about this, but very few people are able to monetize display at that rate, so you may find some publishers that are still interested at this rate, though I do agree that it's particularly low and is only interesting as a last ditch effort of monetizing ad blockers. Though maybe that will be useful in certain communities that heavily favor them.