Clever people with no morals use that to load ads under your finger, timed to create an inadvertent click.
I swear NYT do this in their games app, the play button gets replaced with a subscribe as the late loaded subscribe element shifts the page exactly the amount to put subscribe under your finger. I wonder how well it worked?
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.
Programmers tend to think rules are actually rules, because if you don't follow the rules on a computer then it won't work. But rules in politics and capitalism are primarily a manipulation technique. They state as a fact what they want you to think is fact, not what is actually a fact.
I swear NYT do this in their games app, the play button gets replaced with a subscribe as the late loaded subscribe element shifts the page exactly the amount to put subscribe under your finger. I wonder how well it worked?