You can cut the number of pages you place adverts on by quite a number when you can raise prices (in fact, probably quite a lot of news brands could cut them fr

You can cut the number of pages you place adverts on by quite a number when you can raise prices (in fact, probably quite a lot of news brands could cut them from their news stories entirely and just have them on their lifestyle content, especially on advertorials which often only need minimal configuration on their end). The issue with scale is the physical act of identifying and buying. The best kind of contextual advertising is direct buy aligned with the content. For that, you need a big sales team cutting deals - you can't just tell your one man-band digital marketer to plug some demo info into a bidding platform and be done with it. My programmatic spend was probably 10x my largest direct buy, but was a simple 20 minute phone call with the buying agency vs a month long BS sales cycle with the company I was direct buying from (although the lunches are nicer...).