[ssharp]

There is a lot of money to be captured in paid search with these sites. There are some pretty large players in the space who just built these types of top 5 or top 10 pages for tons of verticals and then bid on keywords related to those verticals. They can go to brands and demand significantly higher fees than most affiliates would get and the brands will usually pay because that acquisition is usually more efficient than try to bid on the terms the affiliate is bidding on.

Back when I was still involved in acquisition marketing, I did a test where I killed all paid search and built relationships with the affiliates to negotiate our "ranking" higher up the page. It was a huge boom for business. We scaled paid acquisition at a profitable CAC, which was very difficult to maintain, let alone scale, in bidding directly and it was significantly less work to manage.

Consumers value this type of content quite a bit, even if many are skeptical of the quality. Sometimes it's nice to just see a pared down list of things with even a cursory rundown of features/differences.