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>thewatchseries.to, a website that aggregates links for illegal streaming of TV shows

Why, thank you! I didn't know about that site before.

Streaming TV shows is not necessarily illegal in some western countries.

The industry jumps up and down and talks about it being illegal - and they want it to be, but they didn't actually succeed in getting the laws changed so that it actually IS illegal.

That's also called traffic arbitrage, or CPC arbitrage. Easy money.
Kalkis research are not very subtle
(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion only, not speaking for anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google, not in ads.)

I am very carefully not going to comment on this beyond linking to public documentation on the issue. This article appears to claim that sites which aggregate links for the purpose of displaying ads are not banned by Google's policies. Here is a link to the policy on such sites:

https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6020954?hl=e...

The "Low Value Content" heading is the most pertinent one.

In reality you still have many sites, that infringe on copyright and display ads by Google. And some of them have done so for a long time. Having a policy is one thing, implementing it another.
(comment deleted)
How is watchseries illegal? All they do is post links. Not Google's problem. The whole argument is so far fetched I don't even get it. If that's the worst thing you found about AdSense, you're grasping on straws. Stop pushing your agenda with this click bait.
Have you ever been to a website that has everything? It finds any search query (e.g. "download _something_") you type.

However, when you try to actually download what you need, it asks for registration and redirects you to other pages keeping you in a loop.

Such websites never give you to download what you searched, because they don't have anything.

Have you ever wondered why they are in the top google search results?

Maybe google fraud detection algorithms are weak? I don't think so. Maybe google gets profit by letting them stay...