[noamyoungerm]

These are two separate concepts. The sponsored stories by outbrain are just your regular old "lose 100 pounds per second" blogspam.

There is another, more benign phenomenon, where a company's PR department writes an article about the company, sends it off to a reporter, and says "Hey, we think you might be interested in publishing this (plus, we already did all the writing for you)" and then the newspaper edits it and publishes it as a regular article.

They see it as a sort of win-win situation. Reporters get an article to publish without any work, and companies get free / cheap PR.