Google does not pay site owners and I thought the big complaint was that users rarely if ever click through. The instant answers keep users and their potential page impressions in Google-land.

Further the users were really only paid if they put Google's ads up on their website to further monetize it or if they had a paywall which meant that their information was much less likely to show up in Google. So Google has only for a short time really paid people back when ads were actually relatively lucrative. Or if you were essentially selling something you could instantly monetize through that sale that Google pointed people too but for people just producing content it's never been that great of a way to reward them for them aggregating their information and selling it to other people.