The web magazine publishing model goes something like this:
Find a vertical with an audience attractive to advertisers, brand it (Daily Finance, Asylum, Lemondrop, Politics Daily), hire five to seven people to run it and plug in AOL's traffic fire hose. Repeat.
The notion of thin-staffed online publications is sweeping the industry. MySpace launched celebrity site DailyFill earlier this year. Last year MSN launched Wonderwall, created by the same team that earlier launched the Yahoo version, OMG. Break Media, owner and operator of guy-centric video site Break.com, hired a few Maxim refugees for its own online lifestyle title, MadeMan. Sugar Inc. has launched a dozen titles off its PopSugar brand. Then there's Nick Denton, godfather of the model, whose Gawker Media has been making inroads in brand advertising after slogging away in this space since 2002.