I've read loads of suggested explanations for why this is a thing over the years, and none of them have ever felt satisfactory to me.

However, none of the people doing this really care why this is a thing, they care that, for some reason, this is a thing. It's vastly more profitable than nearly every other type of advertising, and since nobody _really_ knows how that works either, they just follow their tried and tested patterns that work.

Obvious _you_ wouldn't be this dumb. But it turns out that, on average, you are exactly this dumb ...