Bonnie Fuller invented the modern incarnation of the celebrity gossip magazine at Us Weekly aesthetic — the screaming palette of pinks, purples and yellow, the starburst cover lines, the hand-drawn arrows, and picture pop-outs — which were widely duplicated as a sure-fire formula to get ladies to buy magazines at newsstands. This home page for her newly redesigned site uses all of her old magazine tricks. Simultaneously.

This stew of soft celeb chatter on HollywoodLife.com is all the more overwhelming because of the truly massive pictures Fuller insists on placing on the home page, thus requiring absurd amounts of scrolling to see just one item. That's not the only magazine throwback on the site; the right margin of the homepage is studded with little Us-esque sidebars, which should be as painful for Fuller's poor underlings to maintain/update as they will for readers to skim.

Which isn't to say Fuller's early stumbles will be lethal for her or her boss Jay Penske, who is building a stable of Hollywood news sites of widely varying viciousness. Pictures and chaotic sidebars aside, HollywoodLife has a serviceably clean design, and Web publishing in any case is all about iteration. Fuller just needs to coax a series of user-friendly tweaks from her staff. Given Fuller's notoriously ferocious approach to management, that shouldn't be much of a problem.

Finke's numbers just went onto Quantcast, no doubt through the efforts of her blog's new owner, heir and budding Web mogul Jay Penske, who presumably hopes opening his stats will help sell advertising. Finke is making north of $625,000 from Penske over eight years, according to the New York Times.

She gets around 30,000 to 40,000 people on her site each weekday. The may indeed be influential people. But there aren't that many of them. Except when Finke is the subject of a New Yorker profile, which she can turn into a traffic-spiking multimedia catfight.

It is, perhaps, unfair to expect Finke to attract the several hundred thousand daily readers of an LATimes.com, or the couple hundred thousand of a Gawker.com. Her site is very specialized in insider gossip, more akin to a Variety or Hollywood Reporter. In fact, 30,000 is roughly the circulation of one of those Hollywood trades, if not both.

But if Penske wants to use Finke as a linchpin of a robust online empire — and if Finke wants to seize the incentives that could reportedly double her take to $10 million over the life of her deal — those numbers will need to come up, which means Finke will somehow need to broaden her appeal. Loud fights can only take one so far, after all.

Perhaps "stable" isn't the right word for a collection of media personalities known for their trail of enemies. Finke has had more than her share of feuds and bloodsport.

While Finke tends to spar with competitors and subjects, Fuller is known more for her demanding and abusive treatment of underlings, distance from family and exorbitant pay. After making her name at Us Weekly, the editor flailed atop tabloid publisher American Media and was eventually pushed out.

Now she'll take over Penske's HollywoodLife.com, and adjunct to the failed HollywoodLife magazine shut down by his holding company, Mail.com Media Corporation, last year. It's hard to imagine how Fuller will differentiate the site on the Web, already teeming with celebrity news, hard and soft, from a wide variety of other, better known sources. Penske is surely spending a tidy sum to find out; maybe he can use some money from the same pot to buy some news.

(Pic: by Esther on Flickr)

Age: 30

Residence: The tony Los Angeles neighborhood of Bel Air.

Childhood: Born in New York, Penske went to high school in the Detroit suburbs, where he made the All-American Lacrosse team.

Family wealth: Father Roger Penske, a race car driver, owns Penske Corporation, which owns auto dealerships, leases trucks and makes various auto parts.

Love life: Has dated actresses Lara Flynn Boyle, Gina Gershon, Jordana Brewster (left) and Devon Aoki (with Penske, top of this post)

Personality: Says an associate, "He comes across as hugely elegant, massively sophisticated then as you get to know him, you see this slightly skeevy side, heavy drinker likes to party."

Business: Penske's Mail.com Media Corporation took a $35 million investment from Steve Rattner's Quadrangle Group in September; but we hear he's been having trouble finding properties to buy.

Sites: MMC runs Mail.com, an also-ran email portal whose heyday was in the 1990s; OnCars.com; our former Defamer colleagues' Movieline.com, celebrity news site HollywoodLife (he shut down HollywoodLife the magazine earlier this year) and now Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily. It also provides private-label sites to large organizations like sports teams and universities.

Dragon fetish: Penske also runs Dragon Books, a vanity boutique book store he runs a little Bel Air shopping center. Its placeholder website has been under "redesign" for more than two years. Then there's the Luczo Dragon Racing team, which he co-owns with the chairman of hard-drive maker Seagate Technologies.

Flops: Started Firefly Mobile, selling cell phones for kids, in 2002; by 2006 the company needed a restart.

So how much did he pay for Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood?: Seven figures, supposedly. PaidContent's Rafat Ali reports that his company had been in talks with Finke at a lower number. We heard from Finke's editor at the LA Weekly, Jill Stewart, that Finke was talking as if she was looking at "so much money" while she pondered the deal. Seven-figures sounds mighty high for DHD, but if Penske was having trouble making deals, maybe he was willing to overpay.

Aspirations: Penske is said desperately seeking entree to the fashion world, part of a broader quest for elegance. The same associate:

He wants to be a modern day Si Newhouse, he wants to have a glamourous publishing company.

We hope, then, he reconsiders the name Mail.com Media Corp. as the name of his flagship.