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the nyt has largely done this afaik

the limiting factor is that you have to opt out of a lot of the ad industry. That means transaction costs are high. iow, you have to be super valuable and have a ton of traffic because buyers have to buy from your site by name and often by doing actual work to make the transaction happen.

So this strategy can work, but you need enough volume for it to be worthwhile for the buyers to overcome the cost of working with you. One of the big things exchanges and google offer ad buyers is a low friction experience which means low costs to place a lot of ads.

if you're unfamiliar with the ads, imagine either (1) plugging $50k into whatever demand side platform (dsp), such as google/criteo/the trade desk/adobe/etc and being done; vs hand selecting even 50 or more sites; working with their ad ops to get ads up and running; monitoring 50 different individual budgets, etc. It's just a lot of work on both sides.