[acbabis]

> You may hate it but... you clicked on it. We're giving you what you want. If you like looking at stupid cat pictures (or worse), someone will give you stupid cat pictures. We're not paid to provide moral or intellectual censorship...

That's true to an extent, but go to your Facebook feed (if you have one), find a clickbait article and (without clicking on it) read the comments below.

Almost invariably, there will be someone complaining that they clicked the link out of curiosity then quickly left after discovering how abysmally horrible the user experience is.

Some of the sites literally (as in literally) make you go to a new page of ads for each sentence you read. Their whole business model is to trick you into loading the ads in your browser and showing you as many as possible before you give up.

So it's a bit of an oversimplification to say people are clicking on these links because they want to. People buy snake oil because they want to.