Yes it is the same thing, and it’s just as awful. It’s just as annoying and intrusive in print as it is online.
The purpose is to make it appear to blend in with the editorial so much that it is barely perceptible to the reader that it isn’t actually copy. I don’t agree with you that everyone notices the “advertisement” in the quarter inch high box above every post, including the editorials. The eyes are not trained to look there, the reader is draw to the headlines. The very idea of putting the ads in that way is to trick the reader, just as it is in print, otherwise it would be a traditional ad.
I’m not even saying there is anything wrong with this, people producing web content are criminally underpaid, but I think we can think of more creative ways to generate money.
Gawker isn’t financially successful because they have great ads, it’s because they know how to generate traffic for their ads.
