Who the heck willing to drop millions without having access to sales rep at all? Even Google, known as the king of self-service, still has account managers for large ads, workspace and gcp customers.
It was 1,000 people and 50% fewer users -- and notably, no revenue. If you think they're going to be able to keep any substantial portion of that $4.5b in revenue by telling advertisers to self serve...
I don't think you ever worked with advertiser directly at that scale, I worked in a company that did on a smaller scale and it was hell on earth, no way to automate that, we had 10 people just for them and they were overworked
Both of your statements are just absurdly wrong that they're not even worth engaging with.
12 years ago we didn't have stuff like GDPR or CCPA or any number of data compliance laws that require a full team around to prevent getting fined into oblivion.
They ran this website 12 years ago with the same number of users and like 200 people.