But even in Traffic Vance's case, I'm not sure that they have generated $400 million over the life of the company. Even at $6M/quarter in EBITDA, it would take ~16 years to get there. I'm not sure what else this guy was into, but I doubt he made it solely with malware.
That said, nobody actually needs $400M, and there are plenty of people making $1M+/yr operating useless websites like viral news, quiz sites, etc. There is a ton of money in online advertising. Most goes to Google and Facebook, but there are still billions left over for the "little" guys. The rise of retargeting through Adsense has enabled even the most worthless of sites to show ads that generate reasonable RPM. If you can generate impressions, you can make quite a bit of money.
That said, nobody actually needs $400M, and there are plenty of people making $1M+/yr operating useless websites like viral news, quiz sites, etc. There is a ton of money in online advertising. Most goes to Google and Facebook, but there are still billions left over for the "little" guys. The rise of retargeting through Adsense has enabled even the most worthless of sites to show ads that generate reasonable RPM. If you can generate impressions, you can make quite a bit of money.