> website that made money that way

Some of those scenarios are dubious as to whether they actually bring profit and "make money". They can very well be a net loss and are merely there to justify the job of the advertising/marketing/analytics/etc team, who is conveniently charge of crunching those numbers and obviously would never put any adverse numbers forward.

Same thing in advertising - there's a lot of middlemen in the industry that are happy to take their cut, cook the numbers and look the other way despite no actual impact on sales.

So while I don't disagree these things can make money when in the right hands and done in moderation, the reality is that there's a shit ton of waste and deadweight in the industry. It may very well be that the actual (vs self-reported) profit from ad/marketing efforts is negative and merely covers the paychecks of said ad/marketing teams.