We sell our own ad space, no programmatic at all. It needs 1 high level person who works 4 days to manage. This means you need to earn back all the money you’d make from programmatic plus their salary before it even starts to make sense. Only Gary and Ben have the views to justify this - FM is way smaller than us.

However, you then compare ad revenue to card sales. In our case it’s probably 50/50, ignoring non card affiliate. This means I am willing to invest in selling ads.

If my card revenue was 5-10x my ad revenue though, which it probably is for Ben and Gary, what’s the point of employing someone to sell ads? Even if they double your revenue you only add 4-8% to total revenue. Not worth the grief.

In fact I am more surprised that Ben and Gary don’t dump ads altogether. The loss of cash is relatively small and improving UX would sell more cards. At the very least dump ads for US readers who are potential card buyers.