Aren't a lot of these newspaper sites funded with AdSense as opposed to direct buys/other ad networks? So this would end up Google paying the publisher to send

Aren't a lot of these newspaper sites funded with AdSense as opposed to direct buys/other ad networks? So this would end up Google paying the publisher to send traffic to their site, so the publisher (potentially) earns money from Google for visitor Google has just paid for? Or something like that?!