According to research from ContentNext, news Web sites have a future -- if they can wrangle up about 200 million pageviews each month.

"Based on our research, the conversation [with advertisers] gets interesting at 200 million page views plus a month, but much more so around 800 million," ContentNext's Lauren Rich Fine writes in a report.

For big operations, like at Yahoo (YHOO), AOL (TWS) or the New York Times (NYT), that bar needs to be even higher. In order to survive as a Web-only news product, for example, Fine says the New York Times needs about 1.3 billion pageviews a month.

That's about 1.1 billion more pageviews than the 173 million ComScore says NYTimes.com saw in October.

But Fine figures with that much traffic, the Times could earn about $300 million per quarter in ad revenues.

Yahoo News and AOL News get near a billion pageviews per month, and while their products and brands pale comparison to the Times's, those sites have hundreds of millions of daily email users to rely on for clicks.

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