Your point is more valid for arbitrage sites, where the traffic is not all that highly targeted.

Let’s say you’re looking for a somewhat obscure product like left-handed widgets. Chances are, not a lot of people are out there devoting compelling, soul-wrenching content to left-handed widgets, nor would you want to read it if they were. You just want to buy some left-handed widgets. In truth, you WANT to see ads. In the old days, you’d pick up a phone book, which consists of nothing but categorized paid ads. Now you hit Google.

Up on your search results page comes my-evil-blue-widgets-mfa-site.com. You click, see some thin content, and then what you really want: ads for companies selling blue widgets. You click and find what you’re looking for.

The site owner wins: he gets paid for the click
Google wins: they get paid for the click (and more than the site owner)
The advertiser wins: he gets highly targeted traffic with a high conversion rate.
The searcher wins: He finds what he was looking for quickly.

What the heck is the problem?

1. He/she knows they are ads and will not click on them
2. He/she does not know they are ads and will generally click, because they are interested in what the ad has to offer.
3. He/she clicks on them just to make the site owner money (fraud).
4. He/she knows they are ads, but are truly interested what the advertiser has to offer, and will click.

(i) Often these made for AdSense sites have URLs or domain names that are topically relevant (e.g., housingnetwork.com) that capture direct navigation or type-in traffic (i.e., web traffic that does not use search engines but instead simply types in the words of interest followed by .com in the web browser), which some analysts have indicated represents 15% of all internet traffic. The sites themselves usually have a number of key words on them which are thematically related to the URL, thus resulting in relevant Google advertising being placed on the sites. For those webconsumers who do not use search engines, the site serves as a useful portal for finding topically related advertisers that may be able to provide the specific service or product they are looking for. Without sites like these, the advertisers would be SOL when it comes to direct navigation traffic.

(ii) In a perfect world, Google’s search engine spiders would always rank at the top end of its search results the most content laden sites related to the topic being searched. This simply does not occur. Moreover, more often than not, the entities advertising do not appear at the top of the search engine results for the products or services they offer. Websites made for Google Adsense sometimes do. If the site URL and keywords are geared to the product or service being sold by the advertiser and the website attracts a fair amount of traffic through natural search or other means (such as direct navigation traffic), this is actually providing a service to the advertiser as his/her business now has another topically-related storefront that it would otherwise not have.

(iii) What constitutes a poor user experience is highly subjective. Some could argue that a poor user experience results from visiting a website that does not offer the consumer many choices and/or whose content is full of dribble and does not immediately get to the point. These Google Adsense sites effectively deal with this issue — they get right to the point by serving as an advertising portal and providing thematically related ads for consumers to select from.

Ok, so much of business may be unethical and in the end it comes down to personal choice. As for me however, after starting to go down this track and having set up article sites, and making some money from them, I am pulling out of this scam.