I made my other comment about the disparaging qualities of your commentary, but I just wanted to point out that the numbers you're discussing are actually good for content creators. Incredibly good, actually.

Presuming your DDG example of 100M/day @ $0.01, that would be $328M/year paid out to creators. Bandcamp currently pays out ~$75M annually, and nobody is declaring them "unviable." So, I can't imagine why you consider this amount to be "not much," particularly when it would be additional revenue for creators which is typically 100% absorbed by the search provider.