May this be a complex illegal money transfer?

I have been watching Person of Interest in some websites. I recognized an issue with the ads in this website. The ads are just random videos. They advertise literally nothing. And, somebody is paying to this website for these ads. But why do they pay if the ad does not advertise something? That smells illegal to me. Imagine, you need to make a payment to someone. Let’s say that you are going to pay for a big pile of drug or gun or whatever other illegal trading item. Well, you can’t just write a bill as "drugs: 100k $". You have to make your payment in another way, in a "legal" way. Either you are the owner of this website or you partner with the owner, you make the guy put ads targeted to this website. You pay for the ads, the website earns the money with the help of YouTube (the random ad videos are coming from YouTube, the ones with 1000< views. In here, one parameter is important for the equation, the income of YouTube. Either the YouTube commission is low enough for these guys to pay, or some people from YouTube are involved in this operation, and they define specific videos that are adjusted to get less or no commission. Don’t tell me it is impossible, it is technologically possible.
So, who wins from this operation?
- The illegal guys selling the illegal item getting their money securely
- The illegal guys that are buying the illegal item in a secure way
- YouTube that gets the commission and has no legal bound to these.
Nice operation guys, keep it up!