It is really difficult to make $5,000 per month from only 10,000 visitors. In fact, 10,000 visitors is a very small number! Many of my sites have gotten 200,000 visitors per day!
I am working on a website that is getting 15,000 unique visitors and earn about $40,000, I think it is possible depending on a site and product!
Adsense is not a waste of time, it's just not going to earn 5k a month. One of my websites gets around 8000 visitors a month but the adsense revenue from it is about $75 a month. Adsense should be used as a small piece of the puzzle, not the sole focus of income generation.