Perhaps the best known is Zite, which is available only as an iOS app. It is basically a smarter Flipboard. As you thumb articles up and down, it learns what you like. It works very well. If you need to follow specific topics from a computer, I recommend Trapit, the company I work for.

Trapit (http://trap.it/) is like Zite, only it allows you to follow any topic at all. You tell it which topics you want to follow, then it suggests relevant content. Thumb content up and down, and watch the recommendations improve.

I have compiled an overview of discovery engines here:
http://colemanfoley.com/post/17722454460  /discovery-engine-roundup

But why would you like to get so many pageviews? Only if you depend on ads as your main source of revenue. There are other ways to monetize content, especially high quality. Think out of the box also when it comes to earning money online. Ads is not your only option.

If by “bread and butter,” you mean traffic or revenue. That is just not true But the metrics are a huge arrow pointing to quality. I don’t know about other brands, but that is the only way that it works at The A. I’ve been saying to a lot of journalism kids who come my way that I don’t think journalists are going to escape being judged partially on the numbers, so you have to find a place where the numbers back up what you want to do. Where the brand apparatus, for whatever reason, provides the right kind of amplification for what you want to write.

Is everything we publish a diamond? No, of course not, though that general problem predates the web. (I’ve done a ton of historical research for various projects and I guarantee you that people misremember the golden days of yore in journalism.)

In the year and a half I’ve been at The A, we’ve moved away from precisely the kind of writing you deride. And that trend will only accelerate based on 2011′s numbers. If you were to see the top stories (ranked by unique visitors) for the last 12 months, you’d see a few of things. First, the top is dominated by longer, reported pieces. Second, even stories that look low brow tend to be faux low brow, i.e. a big/funny/webby headline backed up by serious thinking, writing, and/or reporting.

In 2011, we published less per person but higher quality. And we’ve doubled unique users y/y. Our people are taking the right message from these numbers: High volume, churnalism BS gets us nowhere. Quality wins for us.

Last, re: The Wire. That site is a fundamentally a different thing with a different editorial structure geared for speed and breaking news. I like The Wire a lot, but we’re talking about a very different beast that doesn’t purport to not be about speed and breaking news. (It’s called The Wire!)

It’s worth noting that the Atlantic makes the bulk of its bread and butter — supporting its 150+ year old magazine and pedigree — by churning out exactly the kind of high-volume, frequently low-quality writing that Mr. Salmon talks about through the Atlantic Wire and to a lesser extent the Atlantic.com. And that the story of parasites and Toxoplasmosis, as vileville pointed out, has been published already at the Economist, and on Radiolab.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/busine ss/media/the-washington-post-recast-for- a-digital-future.html

TFF, the other great thing this site has – although less than before – is links to original docs.

I suspect that many people read for the comments as much as they do for the articles. Often the people commenting have unique insight. At the very least, they offer a diversity of opinion that no author could hope to encompass.

The Atlantic has a pretty good commenting community (if not as rich as yours, Felix). That, more than the name-value of the publication, draws page views.

Another questionable assumption you make is that great content has intrinsic value, and poor content doesn’t. I like to think of myself as reasonably well educated and truly interested in ideas. However, there are many Great Masters I haven’t read, and sometimes I just want to read about the psycho cat, as a diversion.

Beats me what the Atlantic brand would get more attention than the Economist or Cecil Adams

http://www.economist.com/node/16271339

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read  /2637/if-cat-poop-is-so-toxic-to-pregna nt-women-why-arent-there-more-birth-defe cts

Less really is more.