yes, but my opinion is that ad placement is doing more harm than good. for the site's audience, I think it's a safe assumption that they are fairly web-savvy and able to detect ads without too much effort. As a google adsense block, it's a cost-per-click ad. You see where i'm going with this... savvy users, poor ad placement = very few clicks = no revenue.
of course, that is all anecdotal... I'd be really interested to see real performance numbers on it.
Those ad placements above the content get very high click-throughs when someone arrives at the page via search. One technique that I've used is to only show the adsense to search visitors. Regular visitors tend not to click ads so chances are you won't lose much by doing so.
This technique works in other contexts, too, and is extraordinarily underutilized. (Other options include displaying "house ads" for e.g. pitching "Join our mailing list to get X" or "Our best articles" or "Subscribe to our RSS feed" to convert search-driven transients into recurring visitors.)
You are right. When I first saw the page earlier, I closed it again without even looking at the content because I wasn't bothered scrolling and all I saw was a dirty, ugly page (google ads - a bunch of random links - are ugly as hell). Only after you posted your image did I actually look at the content.
of course, that is all anecdotal... I'd be really interested to see real performance numbers on it.