Just as it seems the entire Web and much of TV is going paparazzi mad and TMZ-ified with ephemeral clips of starlets getting in and out of SUVs (Quick! Panty check!), New York Magazine shocked us a bit the old fashioned magazine way on February 25. Its fashion issue featured the now-infamous Lindsay Lohan/Bert Stern nude Marilyn recreation. The online gallery brought NYMag.com to new heights, as we report in this week’s Min’s Box Scores. The site, which previous grabbed 4.3 million uniques, skyrocketed to 9.6 million, or a 120% gain. Page Views almost hit 156 million, more than three times the usual 35 million level. To its credit however, and unlike some magazine that get such momentary spikes, NYMag.com seems to have leveraged the spike. The site reports its March traffic retained some of the tsunami, with page views up to about 50 million and uniques to 5 million. Of course there may have been some residual Lohan-peeping going on into March that accounts for some of the lasting bump, but it has been our experience that these spike retreat very quickly. The art of managing capricious Web traffic will be a matter of marketing to newcomers as if it is the last time you ever will see them, because it might be.

As we reported last week in MIN, Yahoo’s new Buzz social media engine was starting to push a number of branded media site headlines onto the front page of Yahoo.com. The company reported some specific results from the first two weeks that seem to demonstrate the enduring power of portals married to familiar content labels. To wit:

USMagazine.com had it second highest traffic day ever on Feb. 27 in part from Yahoo Buss referrals. Almost a third of US visits that day were off of Yahoo.

Portfolio.com got a half million refers from a Buss link

Salon.com reaches 1 million uniques in a single day for the first time in its 12-year history after getting linked from a Yahoo Buzz item.

HuffingtonPost.com got 800,000 uniques in on day from a Buzz link.

Even as some metrics mavens argue that traffic is migrating away from portals and to the content niches, it is still apparent that using portals as a funnel towards branded, targeted media is enormously effective.