I like this blog post by Robin Rendle about whether the current disruption of search engines might be a good thing:

Perhaps the web needs to be released from the burden of this business model. Perhaps mass readership isn’t possible for the vast majority of websites and was never really sustainable in the first place.

Most blogs are not monetized with ads and shouldn’t be. There are still indirect benefits to writing on the web. Sharing for the sake of it, bringing people into newsletters or subscriptions, and building an audience that leads to other good things, jobs, friends.