Well, there are places with PTC that pays horrible and I get that but not all places are like that and not all places paid that badly, even today there could be some that pays a bit better. The deal is some places figured out that people do not need to be limited, so they took more and more and more jobs and kept giving people more and more things to click as well.
In return it became a horrible low paying job, like click 1000 ads and get 1 dollar type of situation, or even 0.5 dollars (50 cents) but as long as people were capable of doing that for 10k times that was 5 dollars per day, find 5 jobs like that and we are talking about 25 dollars per day, 750 dollars per month, 9 thousand dollars per year. That is HUGE amount in many nations and not even close to minimum wage, that is literally acceptable middle class level of income in many countries.
Now we have big probolem where are these premium sites those are giving rates like you suggest now we have very few and these cannot pay like your suggest most of them are paying in very few cents and we need very long time for withdraw as we have no ads like these coming very frequently so its just day time dream income like this even in a year.