Were blogs ever more than Adsense?

Baldur Bjarnason argues that old-school blogs were always extractive and exploitive:

The blogging economy was filled with bad practices all around. People today don’t appreciate just how rampant these practices were. Most of us didn’t notice because we were in our tiny corner, all reading the same few popular bloggers (an early version of the modern ‘influencer’). But outside of that corner, blogs were done for Google and paid for by Google. After a few years of buying into the hype, advertisers started to push back.

Baldur Bjarnason

This way of thinking about it all is new to me. I can’t dismiss it offhand.

I have always thought of the fall of blogs as being caused by user experience. Centralized social networks have both distribution and better tooling. If I want my writing to be read, I use Twitter. This blog is more like an open journal.