I searched about for ways to disable this NTP behavior, came up with some things:
* these are called promos\promotions and match you see similarly on
https://www.google.com/
* promos are also used to include PSA's such as advertising a link to assist in disaster recovery efforts
* this has actually been around a while, the capability to include promos has been around in code since at least 2011 if not longer
* the local NTP page does not currently have a way to include promos, try enabling chrome://flags/#use-google-local-ntp and you should notice all promos disappear today