The special interest sites helped some of my articles... some not so much. I get the impression my content is somewhat rare in the sense that 100% of what I have written there is "featured" and two-thirds of my pieces have been finetuned and are on the niche sites.
HubPages is definitely best used for "evergreen" content, which most of my psychology/self-help stuff is... which is also part of the reason I don't put so much of it here on Steemit.
AdSense has always been a "slow death" for me... I still get a $100 payment every 8-10 months or so, although it seems to have slowed some...