The front page design makes me think that they're going for
some whitespace, but that you really can't click on the page without clicking on something. A blurring between ads and content that makes it more likely to accidentally click an ad, and that every click on a page should result in a pageload of some sort, even if the user was intending to click a blank area.
It's like 'horror vacui'[1] applied to web development.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horror_vacui