Was also under the _impression_ of a bit of excessive advertising and double checked the past history: basically it was the same.
But it didn't feel the same.
I guess the reason was that the industry was moving so fast a few years ago. We had lots of genuinely interesting new products and techniques and Michael was always an authoritative, balanced and agreable to read source. We didn't notice the ads that much (at least I didn't) because there was so much new info to digest. As Michael noted in his comments about the state of the current photography market, manufacturers don't innovate that much anymore and that automatically means less material for content...
Also, eventhough I have purchased stuff from this site in the past, I have never ever been spammed. There aren't many sites as well behaved as Luminous Landscape in that respect. Amazon kept spamming me about vacuum cleaning robots for a year, and this _after I had purchased_ a couple of robots from them.
