No, that's exactly wrong.
You tell people that you can get paid for having a URL called, someone will cheat- they will find the most power-and-cost "efficient" way of having that URL called.
Now there are people trying to be "efficient" and there are people trying to monetise content, and the advertiser can't tell the difference, so the mean price of that traffic goes down, and as a result, Buzzfeed (heh) and Wired make less money so they have less to spend on good content.
Eventually, all we get is recycled reality television.
If you really want to blame someone for this, consider that Google is laughing all the way to the bank, because they make more money as demand increases, not when their publishers produce better content. They could stop this, but don't.