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.