The new word of the day is chumbox. Chumbox is those annoying boxes of stories found at the bottom of popular sites. They consist of sensationalized stories about female body parts. Lists that require you to click through pages of ads that trick you to click on other ads. Animals stories that tug at your heartstrings. Medical promises that lead nowhere. There is good business in these ads. They are ads disguised as stories. Sites like CNN and others have them because they bring in lots of revenue. The culprits of these ads are Taboola, Outbrain, RevContent, Adblade, and Content.ad.
Like everything else on the internet, traffic flowing through chumboxes must be tracked in order for everyone to be paid. Each box in the grid’s performance can be tracked both individually and in context of its neighbors. This allows them to be highly optimized; some chum is clearly better than others. As a byproduct of this optimization, an aesthetic has arisen. An effective chumbox clearly plays on reflex and the subconscious. The chumbox aesthetic broadcasts our most basic, libidinal, electrical desires back at us. And gets us to click.(source)