The story went up on VF.com six days ago and has generated just under two million page views since then, says executive online editor Michael Hogan. (Disclosure: I’ve been a free-lance contributor to Vanity Fair’s “New Establishment” list in the past and will be again this year). Had Palin not made her blockbuster announcement on the Friday before the Fourth of July, the piece would be doing even better: Vanity Fair generated more traffic on the Tuesday the story was posted than the day after Palin made her news.

Still, it’s a big coup for the magazine’s site. The only way to generate more attention would be to run a slideshow featuring young attractive women.

Which the site can also do: Its story-and-photo package on Jessica Simpson, which ran in May, attracted 5.5 million page views to the site over a two-day period. Vanity Fair has generated 85 million page views so far this year, Hogan says.

And if you really want to generate traffic, run slideshows featuring very young attractive women. Last year the magazine’s 18-picture slideshow featuring a kind-of-topless Miley “Hannah Montana” Cyrus attracted some 18 million page views in a couple of days.

None of that will be terribly surprising to people who’ve wallowed in Web publishing for any amount of time. What surprised me a bit, though, was Vanity Fair’s decision to publish the piece in its entirety from the start. Doesn’t that cannibalize newsstand sales?

Maybe, says Hogan. But “it’s an open question as to what costs newsstand and what doesn’t.” And as the magazine tries to figure that out, he says, it has been experimenting. Some stuff goes up online before the magazine hits newsstands, while other pieces won’t appear on the site until a month later.

In the case of the Palin piece, the magazine had originally prepared to run an excerpt/summary of the story at first, then make the whole thing available by the end of the month after the news cycle was extinguished.

But on Friday, June 26, a few days before the excerpt was scheduled to run online, the magazine rethought its plan, assuming that the piece would be widely quoted and discussed before most people would ever see it. “The PR department started getting concerned that it was going to be controversial, and they wanted people to read the whole thing, and draw their own conclusions,” Hogan says. The final call went to Editor-in-Chief Graydon Carter, who, I gather, isn’t really much of a Web guy.

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting to read Michael Lewis’s latest piece for the magazine, on AIG’s (AIG) notorious “financial products” division. That one’s only available, for now, in excerpt form online, which means I’m actually going to have pay cash to read it, or wait a few hours–Hogan says it should be available in full later today.

To put that in context, TubeMogul normally tracks uploads by the hour: Last fall, when the “Saturday Night Live” Sarah Palin skits were the hottest thing on the Web, users were sending clips to the site at a rate of 9.5 per hour, says marketing director David Burch.

Yet another testament to Google’s (GOOG) reach, and to the powerful appeal Obama has to the Web generation. And, if we’re going to get technical about it, yet another example of how hard it is for the site to grapple with copyright issues–if copyright holders wanted to, they could probably require the site to take down the majority of these clips for copyright violations, since they’re being lifted from broadcasters’ and other news organizations’ streams. But I’m betting these clips stay up.

In any case, I can’t imagine there’s anyone out there who didn’t see the event live. So here’s a different take from a YouTube uploader, Achangein09, who contributed this clip a few minutes ago:

But here are data that show that Hulu’s post-Sarah letdown may not have been as bad as we thought. The source: comScore.

The measurement company’s “Video Metrix” survey, out today, shows that Hulu’s unique viewers fell 6.4 percent from October to November. The comScore Media Metrix data I cited earlier showed a 10.8 percent drop (click to enlarge).

That’s because the two data sets are measuring two different things. ComScore (SCOR) analyst Andrew Lipsman’s explanation:

While Media Metrix data only accounts for visitors to the property URL, Video Metrix accounts for viewers across the expanded network of sites where video might be viewed. So while only visitors to Hulu.com are counted in Media Metrix, viewers of Hulu videos anywhere on the Internet would be credited in Video Metrix.”

In other words: The new data also include the audience from Hulu distribution partners like MySpace, as well as all those blogs that became de facto distribution partners by taking advantage of Hulu’s handy embedding feature. Once you factor them in, the joint venture between News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and GE’s (GE) NBC becomes much stickier. (But keep in mind that the distribution deals–at least the official ones–cut into Hulu’s slim margins).

Note also that the number of videos viewed dropped by an even smaller margin–3.6 percent. And note that engagement numbers–minutes per viewer and minutes per video–increased during the same time. Finally, note that all of this comes after a huge spike from September to October–uniques had jumped 91 percent–which means that the site was still able to keep most of its new audience.

It’s still worth watching to see how much of that audience sticks around over the long haul. Hulu’s most popular clips for December are almost entirely composed of “Saturday Night Live” bits. And unless I missed something, bits like this Obama parody aren’t generating the same kind of excitement that the Palin clips did. But I gotta say–it sure is easy to embed these suckers.

ComScore says that traffic to the joint venture between News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and GE’s (GE) NBC fell 10.8 percent from October to November, dropping from 5.3 million unique visitors to 4.8 million. (Hulu’s PR team notes that ComScore’s separate “VideoMetrix” panel assigned a much bigger audience to the site last month: 24 million uniques. They haven’t put out November numbers yet but I’ll update when I get them).

ComScore (SCOR) says U.S. traffic at Google’s (GOOG) YouTube also dropped that month, but by a much smaller margin–0.006 percent. And since YouTube is a global property, those numbers are less telling. Hulu, meanwhile, is a U.S.-only site (much to the dismay of blog commenters).

Apologies for not figuring out how to show you this data in graph form–I’ll figure it out eventually. For now, click to enlarge.

This makes plenty of sense: Hulu was one of two places were you could (legally) see the “Saturday Night Live” Sarah Palin clips, which were huge sensations. The other one, NBC.com, dropped a whopping 50 percent–from 14.1 million to 7.2 million, comScore says.

And all sorts of Web sites that enjoyed a bump during the run-up to the election have tailed off a bit since then. ComScore says the Huffington Post, for instance, is down 20 percent– from five million uniques to four million. Presumably Oak Investment Partners was aware of that before it sank $25 million into the site last month.

Meanwhile, Hulu still shows impressive growth. If I could have figured out how to create a graph, you’d see that Hulu has still had a huge run-up since March, when it left beta.

Speaking of beta, video site/blog punching bag Joost has logged its first full month of traffic since its Web video player became open to the public. ComScore pegs traffic at 1.1 million uniques; the company says that its data, which include global traffic, show 2.1 million.

Those aren’t huge numbers–I can think of several text-only blogs, which cost a lot less to build and operate than Joost’s site, that garner more eyeballs than that–but they’re not terrible either. Still, Joost has a lot of ground to catch up if it wants to give Hulu a run for its money.

Last but not least! Here’s an excellent clip from the smart folks at the Onion. It’s a month old, but news to me. Enjoy:

That is almost certainly a record for a Web-only event. But it’s a nonevent by mainstream entertainment standards.

A poorly performing show on network TV, by comparison, draws millions of viewers: Recall that GE’s (GE) NBC canceled “Quarterlife,” the soap opera that started out on MySpace, after it drew an audience of 3.1 million in its debut. A bona fide hit draws many millions more: Last Thursday’s episode of “CSI,” for instance, garnered more than 18 million eyeballs.

Not fair to compare a weeknight audience to one on Saturday nights? OK. Try this: Last year, before anyone had ever heard of Sarah Palin, “Saturday Night Live” was averaging more than five million viewers.

You can’t blame the modest audience on a lack of effort on YouTube’s part. The video site generated plenty of publicity in advance of the event. And heavy promotion on the site itself all but compelled visitors who ventured onto YouTube last night to check it out.

Part of the issue, I think, is that while the show had a smattering of sort-of-popular singers (Katy Perry, Akon) there was no one really huge. Most of the show was dedicated to viral video stars/oddities like Tay Zonday. And the point of viral videos is that you see them on your own time, serendipitously: You take a couple minutes out of work on a Tuesday afternoon to watch Tay Zonday sing “Chocolate Rain” because your friend sends you the link. Not because he’s appearing live on Saturday night.

Could YouTube rustle up a bigger audience for a live event in the future? Absolutely. It’s one of the biggest Web sites in the world, so if it had a truly compelling show, instead of a niche event, it wouldn’t be hard to get the word out. And if parent company Google (GOOG) wanted to lend a promotional hand, game over.

So maybe that’s coming down the pike. In the meantime, if you didn’t tune in last night, here’s a sample of what you missed: Katy Perry singing “Hot ‘N Cold.”

That was fast.

The recent resurgence of "Saturday Night Live," spurred by Republican VP candidate and Alaska governor Sarah Palin and her comic doppelgänger, Tina Fey, may already be over.

How do I know? Well, there's the gut check--I watched most of Saturday's show, which didn't feature Palin or Fey, and it was a snoozer (the absence of new mom Amy Poehler probably didn't help either).

But we can also gauge the reaction of Internet users, thanks to the good folks at TubeMogul, a small start-up that specializes in tracking Web video views.

While SNL's sketches this season have become watercooler hits in both legal form (NBC.com, Hulu) and not-so legal form (YouTube), this weekend's show isn't making an impact, at least so far: TubeMogul says YouTube users are only trying to post SNL clips at the rate of about one per hour, since the show aired Saturday night.

That's down from an average of about six per hour for the other shows SNL has aired this season.

Could it be that NBC--owned by GE (GE)--is just doing an extra-zealous job of keeping illegal copies of its clips off of a video site owned by Google (GOOG)? Mmmmmmaybe.

But probably not: Last Thursday's SNL special, which featured not only Tina Fey, but also show veteran Will Ferrell as President George W. Bush, was a huge YouTube hit, generating 9.5 videos per hour and 1.85 million views in 24 hours.

Meanwhile NBC.com's own data confirm that this weekend's show fell flat: The site says the two political clips posted below have generated a mere 460,000 views since Saturday.

Compare that to Thursday's showstopper, currently at 1.5 million and counting.

I'd bet the remainder of our 401(k) that SNL's staff and cast are going to vote for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama next month.

But the bean counters behind the show are obviously rooting for the ticket of Sen. John McCain and Palin.