In world where the only potential money you could make from a startup is the company's actual income, a lot of things would be different.
They would have 2 routes. Your route: be a $200k p/m. The other is trying to find some other way of profiting from being popular. One that pays better then adsense.
Google does. People look at Google & say: Online advertising is a goldmine, anyone with eyeballs to sell is gonna make a mint. But Google is doing something different.
Eyeballs are worth money. Sure. But the going price for raw eyeballs (eg adsense) is pretty low. Google don't sell eyeballs (on search). Not in that way. They sell a processed eyeballs (eyeball soup?).
You could look at it like manufacturing. There's raw input (oar, coal, etc) that's sitting under someone's field. That go through a value chain from mining to processing to assembling to retail. The market decides where 'value' is created & compensates accourdingly. Sometimes, it's counter intuitive. For example, many manufactured goods that only have a small part (maybe 10%) of their value created in a factory. Retail usually gets a bigger chunk then you'd expect (often %50+). Here's an ipod.
oil_well----plastics------components----assembly---retail-----ipod
You can look at the eyeball/marketing complex like that:
eyeballs-----eyeball soup-------ads--------yahoo stores--salesman--sale
A lot of value can be created between eyeballs & eyeball soup. Based on the success of many businesses that have adwords at the base of their processes, there's plenty more downstream.