[CyrusL]

For the clickbait content ads on Taboola and Outbrain, the strategy is ad arbitrage. The landing page is probably broken up into a slide show with many pages. The goal is to get the user to go through 30 pages (misclicking a few ads along the way) and monetize as more revenue than the cost of their visit. There are other monetization strategies for other types of ads on Taboola and Outbrain.

[earthboundkid]

The arbitrage isn’t illegal but it’s also not not a scam. If you’re running ads against the shite articles and you knew all the traffic to the ad was just people from a different site who don’t even really see your ads, you wouldn’t be very happy to pay for it.