"Selling actual stuff" is why the Internet is awash in soulless SEO blog posts. The only reason to write them is to pull in search traffic from people looking for that term. And there's no reason to want to do that unless you want them to buy something.

This immediately stuck out to me as a flaw. I don't have a problem with, e.g. small content creators selling hats with their logo on, but that site wouldn't be condoned by IFZ.

But a site showing adverts for those hats would be okay? It seems backwards.