I understand where you're coming from because I didn't get Blogger. Around that time, I had my own example.net/~jambo homepage that I updated with stories, probably using Pagemill & FTP. What made Blogger a big deal is that they (eventually) made what I was doing easy for anyone to do. Simplifying something can be a big deal. Gumroad could do this for publishers, and it has an obvious revenue model & incentives built in.

The big deal is that multiple articles on that site are focused on products created by the same guy. If he's not the one actually writing the posts, whomever is clearly has a boner for him.

I could sell you a link to your own comment... I couldn't do that before, at least not easily ;-)

This can disintermediate home made porn - this is not a small market.