A colleague just saw this ad on Facebook promoting an SXSW panel. Clever.

There seems to be something of a cover-up going on at the HuffingtonPost.

Apparently embarrassed by the importance of sex-driven stories in powering its traffic, Huffpo has recently changed its “most popular stories” feature to obscure how many page impressions each story gets.

The stories now seem to be ranked according to # of comments (see example of the new format at the bottom of the post) but earlier this summer, you could see the number of raw impressions each story was getting.

While serious policy-related “politics” stories, which Huffpo pretends are its bread and butter, got 50k impressions, stories like “When your Boob tape is showing” and “Women’s Iconic Swimsuit movie moments” got millions.

For the record, here are screen grabs of the most popular Huffpo stories, as ranked by page views, for three different days earlier this summer, just before Huffpo decided to hide its skin-fixation:

And here the new format, which obscures but not entirely hides, the Huffpo readers’ hormonal urges: