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.
This is actually what happened a few years back when there was a alt-coin called Raiblocks. Right now I think its called Nano. It was basically proof of human and you had to solve captcha puzzles to earn coins. It was similar to proof of work but instead of an ASIC doing the work, it had to be an actual human.
The coin finally hit some exchanges and all of a sudden the Captcha solver services all went up in value and there actually was a way to earn a living doing it 16 hours a day if you lived in some 3rd world country, however there was some abuse going on and it was delisted from Cryptopia and the prices again fell.
Either way, you need to understand that by clicking ads or solving captcha's you will never get rich. This is why most people just gamble their own BTC because the earning potential is huge. When you solve captcha's and get faucet earnings you will never make any decent money that way. This is why many casinos just removed the faucets all together to combat abuse.