"Our traffic has been beyond any estimates that any of us had projected," said BermanBraun co-owner Lloyd Braun, a TV executive and former head of the Yahoo Media Group.
In April, the last month its data were broken out, Wonderwall had 9 million unique visitors, putting it past People and into third behind TMZ had it been ranked by comScore among other entertainment news sites.
"They would not be there were they not affiliated with a Yahoo or an MSN or these large corporate entities," said Perez Hilton, the celebrity blogger who runs PerezHilton.com. "I think their numbers are misleading."
Omg, like its rivals, says it has been gradually succeeding at deriving more of its traffic "organically," through search queries or people bookmarking the pages. But there's no question traffic from the portal helps it stand out among some 1,000 or so celebrity news sites that have popped up, and occasionally dropped out, over the past several years.
The tone of omg, like Yahoo itself, is bright, breezy and nonjudgmental. Blurbs written by omg staff link to original stories and photos elsewhere on Yahoo or at other sites.
Following Jackson's unexpected death, omg took a respectful, celebratory view of the pop icon's life through photo galleries and celebrity reaction stories, leaving the hard-driving news pieces to Yahoo's front page and news site.
"We just like to tell the happy view on what's going on in the entertainment world," said Sibyl Goldman, an entertainment group vice president.
That bright spin has attracted advertisers worried that appearing next to salacious scandal stories would turn off some consumers. State Farm Insurance Cos. has sponsored a series of short celebrity-mom interviews, targeting mothers in a conflict-free format that avoids some of the celebrity muckraking of other sites.
"It's not all about traffic," said Ed Gold, the insurance company's advertising director. "Our goal is not to put State Farm into environments that aren't appropriate to our brand. There are some (celebrity sites) that may go a little bit too far in what they cover."
People.com Editor Mark Golin said that while such sites may capture a lot of visitors, reliance on a portal home page may not work in the long term. Although People benefits from links on AOL's home page and other sites - even omg - Golin said most traffic comes to the site directly. People writers work both for the magazine and the Web site although he wouldn't reveal how many.
"We have our own reporters. We create our own center of gravity," Golin said. "Even should readers hear a piece of news somewhere else, they'll still end up coming to us to make sure it's true. You don't necessarily get that with an aggregator."
Benefiting from the largesse of a portal is nothing new: TMZ launched in November 2005 attached to the AOL home page.
