I don’t know if you saw the nude pictures of Lindsay Lohan NY Mag printed recently, but chances are you did.

This cool story in Forbes tells the business repercussions:

“For a site that’s averaged around a million page views a day lately, the results were stunning. NYmag.com recorded a total of more than 40 million page views Monday and Tuesday, more than 34 million of which came from the Lohan portfolio, [NY Mag spokesman Lauren] Starke said.”

That translated into about $500,000 over two days from banner advertisements, or “about as much revenue per day from its online slideshow as it would from four $64,500 full-page color ads in its print edition.”

That’s pretty amazing. Shows just how out-of-control popular celebrity news nowadays.

Reminds me of Gawker bravely hosting the Tom Cruise Scientology video in the face of litigation, clocking an easy 2.3 million pageviews. From NY Times:

“Some former Gawker bloggers have criticized a new compensation system that on top of a base rate pays $7.50 for every 1,000 views that posts generate. If one of [Gawker editor Nick] Denton’s bloggers had posted the Tom Cruise video, his or her haul thus far would be more than $17,000.”

These are all impressive numbers, but where does the journalism fit in?

Well, as you may have heard, newspapers have been on the downs recently, as circulation has been falling along with advertising revenue. These big paydays have surely caught the eyes of some editors looking to get their websites making money.

Will newspapers be able to break these sensational stories before TMZ? Who knows, but it’ll be interesting to see how these big paydays entice editors.

Personally? I think they should be focusing on the long tail, but we’ll see how that works out.

Forbes ends with a disturbing thought:
“Hmm. Makes one wonder: What’s Britney up to these days?”

This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 6:31 pm and is filed under Featured, general, internet, magazine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.