Let's boil it down to eCPM. What is your eCPM going to be? Multiple that by impressions and tell me how you're going to support N employees on that revenue.
If you have a product you're selling for $10/mo you'll need 1,667 subscribers to make $200k/yr not taking into account churn, customer support overhead, etc
The question is whether you think getting millions/billions of impressions is easier than getting thousands of paid subscribers or not.
Also, FWIW, 10m impressions a year is nothing - it's 1 impression every 20 minutes on average. 2b impressions a year is more like 60 impressions a second, but still not ridiculously unattainable.
"The same could be said for 'paid subscribers'.
If you have a product you're selling for $10/mo you'll need 1,667 subscribers to make $200k/yr not taking into account churn, customer support overhead, etc"
1667 customers isn't that difficult if you have a good product that works well. Free services still have all the same customer support costs (not to mention the order of magnitude amount of traffic you will have to support).
"The question is whether you think getting millions/billions of impressions is easier than getting thousands of paid subscribers or not."
In almost all cases, paid subscribers are easier. Most sites that are ad-supported (unless it's a blog) eventually move to a paid plan (or have both paid and free accounts).
