People have repeatedly shown that they are not willing to pay for the content they consume. They might pay 10€ a month for Spotify or Netflix, but small independent creators are lucky to get an occasional donation.

Affiliate marketing is a deal with the devil, but it's still a deal worth making. They let me work full time on building a useful resource and offering it for free. I can work with dignity, without having to beg for money, and still without selling out.

They similarly finance many people whose content saved me time, money and stress.

They also finance lazy people, some of which steal my content. However killing their income stream kills mine, and it still leaves you with far more prevalent first-party blogspam.

In my opinion, the solution lies in better content curation tools. None of this would be a problem if search engines surfaced quality content once in a while.