Fuck it. I'll play along.
Buzzfeed and the other a hundred or so copycats.
Searchengineland.com, sejorunal.com, smashingmagazine, ColledgeHumor, NatGeo, Scientific american, goodhousekeeping.com to name just a very FEW. I've written for some of those and have seen the actual traffic numbers. There are thousands of pages which promote something and do very well. Those are the ones I saw in 2 minutes browsing my feed.
I can go in a lot more detail, but this is just not the place. The reality is that marketing and PR is fucking hard. It's like me saying "I tried to build a spaceship, but Boeing's parts just suck big time, so I couldn't".
I just don't get why people think they can just wake up one day and be rockstar PR specialists. Just because you can click a few buttons on a web page doesn't mean people want to read your shit.