I don't think it's Google's responsibility to insure that your web sites makes money, that's still between you and the visitors.
I agree however when one's mission statement was to "organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, since deprecated, then they surely had a responsibility towards all those evergreen publishers especially, not to simply present their sites, but to at least try and ensure their time and effort does not go unrewarded, after all, they pay their employees don't they to scrape our sites for them to profit from?
There are now millions of global publishers working as slave labourers and who derives the profit from all this effort, Google.
Tell me, despite all the valuable information contained in my directory site, just how am I supposed to get people to click on the ads? Like millions more in this Internet age they simply want it for free ... just like Google.
Quite simply I am not prepared to put any more effort into my trade directory site if it can't even reach the measly minimum per month even though it has plenty of visitors. You know not all of us here jump from one computer project to another and move on to pastures new, my business is 180 years old and will still be here when Google's long gone, our skills, knowledge and expertise will still be required long into the future.
I'm not looking for sympathy, what I do want is for a lot more people, especially the fanboys here, to realise that Google has been a one-way street for a long time and for the vast majority of publishers things will only get worse and worse with them.