On the other hand, not paying with money for quality content is breeding the even worse cancer of shallow ad-driven content. Where the only thing that matters now is enough of an illusion to generate a click, horizontally scaled with AI-slop to trawl coverage of every possible search term.
Success of online advertising model seems to have destroyed a lot. It is now so bad that even if you pay you get the advertisements... So you end up with worst of the both worlds...