Do sites like mashable, techcrunch promote paid posts?

Over the past few days I have seen the following post http://goo.gl/dJjo9 retweeted/reshared a number of times by mashable, normally they just share a post once on their facebook page. Also, if you look at the number of shares/likes the post has recieved is far higher than what they usually get. It is actually 44k for this article compared to 5-6k for a site average. Is it possible that mashable got paid for this article and hence they are promoting it ?