A week ago, when New York magazine put online pictures of Lindsay Lohan posing semi-nude to evoke Marilyn Monroe's last photo shoot, old and new media reacted very differently. While online sites just linked to the images or stole them outright, newspapers struggled to find something meaningful to say, as though the emergence of Lohan's breasts in a serious magazine demanded serious comment.

A Newsday article compared Lohan's decision to "undress up" as Monroe to the way Barack Obama tries to channel John F. Kennedy. Sure. And a New York Times writer suggested that the images were "causing a ruckus in the blogosphere" not because Lohan was naked but because the photos were taken by Bert Stern in a way that mimicked his famous portfolio of Monroe. While the images are artful, one can only assume that this last point was made by someone who has never actually been online.

A New York spokesperson has said that the magazine's website, which normally receives about a million page views per day, got 40 million on Monday and Tuesday. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that at least some of those additional viewers were less interested in Lohan's attempt to evoke the faded glamour of Camelot than they were in checking out her tits. And I'm going to further guess that the editors at New York (where, full disclosure, I worked years ago and write occasionally) knew exactly what they were doing when they presented very tasteful images that could be enjoyed as art by the magazine's regular readers and as — well, let's say titillation, by those who saw them on the Internet.

The strategy paid off — literally. The magazine is enjoying good buzz, and copies are selling for as much as $10 on eBay — not bad for a magazine that sells yearly subscriptions for about double that. But it's the website that's really making money. On Wednesday, a clever Forbes.com article did some back-of-the-envelope math, multiplying the increased page views by the site's banner ad rate, and estimated that the photos could have brought in as much as half a million dollars in revenue. Since a spokeswoman said that the magazine paid Stern its normal rate and Lohan nothing, that sounds like a pretty sweet deal. Unlike, say, Radiohead, Stern and Lohan can't offer their work directly to the public because they need the imprimatur of a top magazine to make sure the images are seen as artful.

Lohan's images represented an even sweeter deal for the sites that linked to them, or posted them without permission. Plenty of sites posted "stories" about New York so anyone searching for the images in Google would see them as well. (And, hey, I'm guessing that this will be one of my more popular posts for the same reason.) Others, like the Superficial, simply took them outright. This is illegal, immoral, and pretty funny, since I can't imagine that very many of that site's viewers will have any idea that these images were meant to be, you know, art.

It's hard to know how many people who go to the New York website will pick up on that, either — but the the magazine will make money either way. On the Internet, a hit is a hit.