[ksk]

>People used to do that for free because they cared about the content they were writing, rather than because it was making their daily bread.

Those two points are not necessarily connected. People can and do, do a good job at things even if they're just doing it for the money.

>I distinctly remember the quality of writing during this time being much higher than it is today.

What writing are you thinking about? Personally, I can't think of anything that was better.

[Sir_Substance]

>People can and do, do a good job at things even if they're just doing it for the money.

In order to make the big dolla dolla on ads, your piece can't be too confronting, it can't be so dense or specific that's it's unapproachable for a general audience and it can't critique the people who supply your ads. It probably needs to use simple enough words and sentences that it translates through google with reasonable accuracy. It must have a sufficiently eyecatching title and meet a minimum of entertainment value for the average netizen.

Most importantly, it must cater to the facebook, twitter and/or reddit communities well enough to trend on at least one, and thus must meet the community standards that prevent those communities or their moderators from quashing it.

In short: content that is effective at generating ad revenue must be shallow, vapid and limited in scope.

These days, my best source of written content on the internet comes either from company blogs and pages, which notably do not survive on ad revenue since they have a real business model paying their hosting bills, or from community/project specific blogs and pages, which are generally donation supported.

[ksk]

>content that is effective at generating ad revenue must be shallow, vapid and limited in scope.

Even if I grant you all the generalizations you made, You will still not make any revenue unless your audience is interested in content that is shallow, vapid and limited in scope.

[Sir_Substance]

>You will still not make any revenue unless your audience is interested in content that is shallow, vapid and limited in scope.

That's total garbage. Correct game theory when making monetized content for profit is to have it spread as widely as possible. Whether it's good quality or even factually correct is vastly less important than that it be spread widely, quickly.

The goal is not to get people to read the content, it's to park a piece of advertising in front of their face that they are willing to click on. The job of deciding which advertising they will click on is dealt with by the content network. The authors job is to get eyeballs on a page they can affix ads to. Vapidness is great, because it's cheap and non threatening, and to demonstrate this principal, I present to you buzzfeed, vice and wired:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/ http://www.vice.com/en_se http://www.wired.com/

(I don't even need to take static shots of them, they'll be covered in shallow garbage any time of day or night)

[ksk]

You have a curious way to call my point "garbage" and then proceed to agree with me. You must have parsed it in some odd manner.

[Sir_Substance]

I guess I thought you were saying that if an audience wasn't into that sort of thing, the site that originally attracted them wouldn't want to alienate them by dropping the quality pieces. But it doesn't really matter what a sites audience is interested in, if the site is hopping on the ad train they'll want to move to shallow and vapid as rapidly as possible. Certainly that's what happened to wired (and time).