Nothing clever about it: it’s a simple and unethical parlour trick.

Every news website does it and, in the UK, the local news outlets are amongst the worst.

The thing I don’t get: many of these sites are running Google Adsense, amongst other ad networks. Adsense Ts & Cs specifically forbid site behaviour that deliberately causes users to misclick on ads.

So why aren’t these sites being banned by Adsense?

The answer, I suspect, is follow the money: it seems likely that they bring in too much money for Google to ban them even though they’re overtly and outrageously breaking the rules.