It might help to be clearer about what I&#x27;m getting at here.  The question is not whether effective (and cost-effective) advertising exists, nor whether anyone anywhere knows how effective their advertising is.  Clearly it does and some people do.<p>It&#x27;s whether (a) buying ad impressions on a clickbait listicle (or other &quot;bullshit&quot; page) is cost-effective or effective at all, (b) whether writing and hosting such pages is profitable once all internal costs are properly considered, and (c) whether the advertising formats the author is complaining about are cost-optimal or even effective at all.  I took the GP&#x27;s claim that &quot;it works&quot; to mean that the answers to all three questions are an emphatic yes.  I&#x27;m not so sure we know that, and I&#x27;m not so sure it&#x27;s true.  It seems likely that the answers might well be &quot;almost never&quot;, &quot;probably not&quot;, and &quot;maybe sometimes&quot;, but factors other than profitability are at work that cause the people making the decisions to do these things even when an omniscient rational corporation would not.  Improper use of statistics or poor data collection could certainly be an explanation for that, but I propose that it&#x27;s more basic than that.  Of course, I might also be wrong, and maybe all this bullshit <i>does</i> work, and works very well.  That just doesn&#x27;t seem like the slam dunk that was implied.