Yes and no. The eyeballs model has been maligned too much, I think. If you have 10-20M attentive people, it is easy to make money. Just ask NBC or USA Today. Then ask them about their plans now that their audiences are declining.
The great thing about the massive-eyeballs model is that it's very easy to measure, very easy to pick and choose between advertisers, etc.
The bad thing is that it reminds me of that saying "if X is so easy, why isn't everyone doing it?" Well, everyone is. So they need lock-in mechanisms like subscriptions.
In short, it's fragile & cut-throat but it has a great potential for buckets of easy cash.
"I am amazed I managed to create this program in the first place, I barely barely even understand how it works and I wrote it. This is because the program scans in multiple dimensions is very hard to conceptualize. "
I believe he is plenty smart but that he does have a lot of traffic and he monetizes it only one way. It seems to me that he could be getting multiple levels of monetization out of his system but he is not. He has been determined and dare I say smart enough to get this far, but he could be reaching out to the next level and building upon his success.
