By Amanda Hess @ NYTimes.com, May 17

[....] These companies occupy real estate at the margins of websites like CNN, Politico and TMZ, and fill them with links to content landfills with names like Buzz-Hut, CollegeFreakz, Dogsome and TimezOff. The links are often ads for stuff like bedsheets and dental implants that are disguised as news articles — or else barrel-scraping clickbait that tempts the reader toward still more ads — and because the thumbnails and headlines are written by the individual advertisers themselves, they range in caliber from straightforward sales pitches to gross body stuff. The links appear under the banner of “Related Content,” “You May Also Like,” or — their most accurate descriptor — “Around the Web.”

While some news sites, including The New Yorker and Slate, have recently banished such links from their pages, deeming them too déclassé to rub shoulders with their own content, others welcome the easy revenue boost. According to the data analysis firm Datanyze, Taboola and Outbrain are the oldest and biggest services in the business, but even upstarts like Revcontent and Adblade have significant sway over what we see on the web [....]