Obviously anecdotal but from my experience of having done a bit of tech support for many friends and family members, this kind of content is extremely popular. By this kind of content, I mean what I consider low-effort memes, jokes and gifs surrounded with copious amounts of ads. Many if not most users seem to be ok with it.

The shared.com content seems to be harmless fluff. Unless there's something underhanded going on here, I am inclined to admire their ability to turn manure into gold.

Yeah, but it's so bleak.

10 years ago, that kind of site was called a "content farm". I don't hear that term used much lately. Google spent a lot of effort peeling dreck like that off of their search results with limited success. Facebook, it seems, has had use for them until recently.

The OP/CEO seems comes off as utterly delusional when he says... > "Until recently, we had more than 25 million enthusiastic fans on 11 pages."

Yeah, right, "enthusiastic" if he really means getting them to click on stuff by exploiting subconscious glitches in the human basal ganglia overriding cognition.

Facebook + Shared.com must have been good while it lasted, at their users' expense, but f them both.

I grew up reading the Iliad under the covers in bed and share your pain. I still read the fluff, though. All work and no play... ;)

This is very common content marketing content. These articles are not intended to educate the reader, they're written to get high search rankings, and high click throughs.

So is the business that I buy an ad on Facebook, someone clicks on it, I then show them a bunch of ads, and I get paid enough for those ads to recoup the money I spent on my Facebook ad, and then some?

Kind of genius, in a way.

I always wondered who's actually making the money, when so many ads inside free mobile games are for other free mobile games. Someone has to actually buy something at some point!

I wish there was a global tracker for services that make money through ads, that reported the percent of ads that are for other services in the same category. All that data is secret though, probably.

I don’t actually know. And I was about to joke, but on second thought bet it is actually true, that at the end of the chain, all the money is in actually selling ED pills, hair-loss treatments, and porn.

Or just blatant click fraud.

Ye I believe so. They have like a picture of Britney Spear and an drug addict with the text "You can't believe how the celebtrity looks now" but no Britney if you click the article. I have seen it on Forbes looking over a shoulder without adblock.

I guess they do click scams via bots too?

Sounds like an application of Sturgeon's law fits, here.

arbitration. Spend less on FB ads than what you earn shoving ads into the users browser. That's the real thing here, FB knows they can get crap content and earn more than 54 million lost in advertising it to 3rd party.