Pure genius or not, AT are whores for putting an ad like that on their site... I understand that ad revenue is important to keep a site running, but that ad (regardless of the content) interferes with the comfortable reading of the site's contents, which is what we go to AT for.
edit: another downside is that crap like this has caused their website (not the forums) to load incredibly slow until you get all the crap cached...
edit2: they don't appear to have the full page ad that covers up the article anymore.