By NYU Staff

Barry Diller and Tina Brown Source: Google Image

At the doorstep of its one year anniversary, The Daily Beast, has reached three million unique visitors a month this September. But it is still hoping the buzz will one day turn into bucks.

Luckily, for the time being, the Daily Beast doesn’t need to worry about money too much. With $18 million in funding from New York media mogul Barry Diller, the 24 Beast staff, led by veteran news editor Tina Brown, is focusing on content to drive up the traffic.

As Brown said in a recent interview: “I think news is the best marketing budget. I’d rather have news than a marketing budget. If you have stories people want to read, that’s the best way to market your site. It’s much better than pictures, posters, and expensive advertising.”

And Ms. Brown is in a perfect position to do so. As the former editor of a list of reputable names including the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, talk show host, and author for book “Diana, Princess of Wales,” Tina Brown, 54, has done it all in journalism. There is no surprise that top writers are flocking onto her site.

Some popular names have proven to be major traffic drivers. Chris Buckley, who has been writing a column for the Daily Beast since its launch, is one of them. “It’s been picked up everywhere,” said the executive editor Edward Felsenthal. “Some articles are still driving traffic months after they were published. It’s been great for us.”

Edward Felsenthal, a former editor at the Wall Street Journal, left earlier this year to join the Daily Beast as its executive editor. He said the Web site still serves as a semi refuge for traditional print journalists and book writers who are used to fax. “We receive phone calls from well-known writers saying ‘I just wrote a piece, but I don’t have a computer. I have to fax it to you!’,” said Felsenthal.

The Drudge Report and the Huffington Post are in line with what the Beast tries to do. But The Daily Beast is “not trying to be anything like them,” said Felsenthal. “We don’t want to be another aggregator.” At the Daily Beast, all the content goes through the editors. “It sifts, sorts and curates. We accept and we reject,” Felsenthal said.

Most of the writers are on a freelance basis. The Web site pays a fee to its contributors and demands a fee from other sites that link to its content. The Web site has already made modest money from such syndication.

“Syndication is a great idea,” Felsenthal said.  “It is not bread yet, but, butter.”

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