A viable strategy for making money, or providing value to society?

I think for some niches, the former can for a brief period precede the latter. But eventually the market catches up and roots out that which lacks actual value.

More concretely, I suspect the advertising apparatus is going to increasingly devalue unattributed content online, favouring curated platforms and eventually resembling a more hands on media distribution with human platform relationships (where media == the actual medium of distribution not content).

That is already a thing, where for example an instagrammer promoting your product is more valuable than the automated ad-network on instagram itself.

At which point, hopefully, automated content and spam loses legitimacy and value as ad-media.