Are nudes good news?

Take a look at the list of the most popular stories on any news website and you're almost certain to see at least one with the word "nude" in it. It is, of course, one of the most searched-for words and it draws Googlers to sites they might not otherwise visit. At the moment, the story doing all the business is about footballer Brendan Fevola's nude photograph of model Lara Bingle, with whom he had a brief fling a few years ago. (Are the management of Fevola's new club, the Brisbane Lions, surprised it took him so long to get into the headlines for the wrong reasons, I wonder.) However, with paid content very much on the agenda at the major news organisations, is this kind of traffic really helpful? How many of the people who come to these websites because they think they are going to see a naked model would ever pay to do so? (A quick estimation: none. Especially after they discover that they don't actually get to see a nude photo.) And does a reputation for prominently posting such material (or at least pretending to be publishing it) really help the credibility of news sites that hope to charge for content one day soon? These are questions people in high places in the media really should be asking themselves as a matter of urgency.
PS: Before anybody else says it, the Fevola-Bingle story is a legitimate one. But plenty of "nude" news stories are not and their presence on news websites is used purely to draw traffic in what I would argue is a very short-term strategy.