Jonah Peretti figured out how to spam the web better than anyone with the Huffington Post. He also figured out how to get away with it. It's been called the veneer strategy. The idea is to take a little bit of legit content and make it look like that's the site. In reality all of your real traffic comes into your many thousands of shitty linkbait articles. This throws off Google's spam team and confuses people about what you're doing. Hopefully you sell before the house of cards comes crumbling down.
There's a reason McDonald's sells salads and it's not because they believe it's the future of fastfood. It provides cover when the idea of sickening billions with shitty food occasionally heats up.