So RadarOnline is a key part of its catch-up strategy. AMI acquired the site after Radar, a magazine meant to offer a sophisticated take on the world of media and celebrity, failed to catch on after several tries.
Would "Today" and other mainstream media outlets be relying so heavily on all those Octo-Mom scoops if they were branded as National Enquirer content rather than RadarOnline? Ponder that question and you begin to see why buying the Radar name proved valuable for AMI. If the point of the purchase was to start with a fresh online slate and avoid the tabloid taint, it's a diabolical plan that's succeeded brilliantly.
For all that, RadarOnline still faces an uphill climb, Octo-Mom or no. The online celebrity-news market is already near the saturation point. In addition to TMZ, there are Perez Hilton and Gawker, as well as Web versions of old reliables such as People.com and EOnline.com.
On the other hand, celebrity is, along with politics, one of the few topics that can drive huge traffic to news sites. Perez Hilton's blog ranks in the top 400 of all websites with a whopping 184 million page views per month, according to measurement service Quantcast. Dish Rag, the celebrity site at latimes.com, is often the paper's most-visited blog. The appetite for other types of show-business news -- the executive shuffles covered by Deadline Hollywood Daily and its new archrival the Wrap as well as TV-episode recaps on sites such as TelevisionWithoutPity.com -- pales by comparison.
Gawker Media recently folded Defamer, a running commentary on stories in the Hollywood trades and elsewhere, into its flagship Gawker site. Nick Denton, the company's founder, said that Defamer's traffic was simply too small to be sustainable as a stand-alone entity. "Size matters," he wrote me in an instant-message exchange.
Whether any other type of news can be supported online remains to be seen. But it is proven that celebrity sells well on the Web. Online, celebrities are themselves a form of mass entertainment, like video poker or porn. That's why newcomers keep jostling at the celeb-gossip trough.
Maer Roshan, a longtime New York-based magazine editor who tried to get Radar off the ground for years, isn't thrilled with what has become of his former brand, now that it's run by tabloid bosses.
Having recently relocated to Southern California, Roshan, who's no longer associated with Radar, told me by phone Friday: "It's not the website we would have published."
