this puts you outside the reach of big ad $, which is moving towards programmatic buying and serving retargeting ads.

You may be able to link up to a big player, but hosting things yourself will require quite a bit of overhead and they pay off may not be worth it, unless you're getting substantial volume (or appealing to a very targeted audience)

btw, traditional display ad CTR is rubbish from an advertisers perspective and we all want to go all in on programmatic + retargeting.