Adsense Sponge Sites

I see many of these random off the wall type sites, with 0 purpose. I am curious if anyone knows how these sites work, and how they still have the money to exist. The sites I am speaking of are the sites with 0 useful content and ads everywhere. You usally go to them accidently when you spell a website url wrong. I was also was looking to sell one of my websites on eBay, and I stumbled upon a few of these sites for sale. They use basic RSS feeds and have so called "hot" keywords that attract many users and get you adsense hits... Can anyone elaborate? Is there truely money to be made in this scne, or?

Yes, people do make money of the ones you talk about, simply because of the type-in traffic or typo traffic like you've experienced. RSS feeds are great ways to generate ever changing content and this keeps people interested and coming back again and again. Alot of it is to do with search engine optimization as well.

The sites that really don't make money are those with poor content and a poor domain name, but a decent domain that gets traffic regardless of it's content will more than likely make a buck or few from adsense.

Think of it like this, a shop in your highstreet that's been closed for 6 months and plastered with those advertisement posters. There is still traffic for the shop, people are still viewing the advertisements, theres just nothing worthwhile there. Same sort of thing.