• Adweek, Wednesday, November 17, 2010 12:46 AM

Newsweek.com may survive in some form, but its traffic benefit to The Daily Beast is questionable. One of the supposed benefits of the Newsweek-Daily Beast merger was that it would combine the traffic of the much-bigger Newsweek.com with the Beast's. Newsweek.com has 3.8 million monthly uniques to the Beast's 1.5 million, according to Web measurement firm Compete (although the Daily Beast claims its traffic is actually 5 million).

But as critics of the deal are pointing out, more than half of Newsweek.com's traffic comes from MSNBC and MSN. Newsweek pays MSNBC roughly $3 million a year for the traffic, according to sources. The traffic can vary by month; for the month of October, for example, it was 38% of Newsweek.com's traffic, per Compete.

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