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Ye. These "You can't guess how 'random actor' looks now" and then a picture of some drug addict and not the actor. The actor in the ad is nowhere to be seen if you click the ad. I actually got fooled to click because I couldn't believe that the actor got like that and it looked like an article on the "honorable" newssite ...

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What's the endgame for those ads? How is your click meant to convert to revenue? Plain old scams?

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.

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.

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