Greenwich Time has sabotaged its own online version

Lately, the paper has been placing immovable advertisements on the face of its text, rendering the article itself unreadable. Other news sites do something similar, such as the Daily Mail, but they allow the option of swiping them aside, or closing them. Not GT. Is the paper trying to drive would-be readers  to another version, behind a cash wall (not that I'd pay for it anyway, but it doesn't exist), or are they just determined to render their online version useless in an attempt to rejuvenate sales of the dead tree version? 

If the latter, that's an idea as dead as the trees they're slaughtering.