Hmm.. good point. You know this is a problem too in general. So many useless jobs and useless industries, serving little value to society, yet they are needed because they provide a living for so many people.
This is a result of too many humans on Earth. So many people are just not needed on this Earth. So we have to come up with surrogate occupations
I think the problem may be less with too many humans and may be with the preoccupation of "Everybody must have a job! 9-5, Monday to Friday. No exceptions or you're a failure and the country is failing and it's all our leaders fault."
I mean really, we're heading towards more and more automation. There just aren't going to be as many jobs as there once where. Yes, we might get more programming jobs and management jobs. But not enough to replace the hundreds of jobs replaced by a few robots in a factory.
The problem with that analogy is that 90%+ of the farmers are growing coca or poppies today. Without a viable alternative "crop" or payment mechanism on the open web, I think the net effect will be to drive all of the content which advertising is paying for today into walled gardens, like a Physorg "app".
Having content locked behind a pay-wall so even less people can access it ?
Running ads which are more relevant but don't generate enough revenue to make the site viable in the long term ?
Not having the content at all ?