No it's not. As long as they're buying well qualified traffic, then there is no difference. I don't care who's paying more for their traffic. Organic traffic isn't 'better' in any sense except that it's free.
The devil, as it were, is in the conversion rate. If I have a $1M/year ad budget, and I'm successfully converting that budget into $10M in revenue. Well, then I'm a successful business.
If I spend $0/year in revenue, and convert my purely organic traffic into $1M... well I'm also a successful business, but (likely) less so than my more aggressive counterpart.
At the end of the day, it's about the bottom line. I have no idea which company is in better shape based on their traffic numbers. But to blithely say 'well, fansnap isn't successful because they gaspbuy/gasp their traffic' is lunacy. It's about making money... nothing else.
