PopURLs and AllTop are both doing a decent job making destination sites out of what essentially amounts to unique formatting of selected RSS feeds. Personally, I wouldn't have thought that this is possible - being the sort of fellow enamored with interactivity and customization, I'd personally never set something like AllTop as my home page. My news-gathering needs are far too specialized and voracious to be satisfied by any single news site.
Yet the numbers bely the fact that I'm in the minority when you consider the general at-large user-base of the Internet. When you consider what the average person's start page generally is (a My.Yahoo or iGoogle page), it essentially boils down to a search box with their favorite news sites headlines on them. Sure, the numbers of visitors to the startups in this space aren't astronomical, but those that do use these sites for their news portal are very loyal, and the traffic tends to reflect a stable of readership.
The site has no official relationship with Google, but for those interested in the financial goings on of the search giant, it has just about every bit of news from both Old Media and New relevant to the company. Much like Techmeme, the site is powered a combination of hand editing and custom search bots that scour the net for news.
Currently, the project isn't monetized or even set up with a business yet. In the experimental stages of development, Frank intends on creating a stable of sites built off the engine he's designed to be the backend for Google Investor News - in fact he already has two other sites that run off of the same engine (which he's dubbed "Intelligent News Search"). For Apple fans with financial interest in the company, there's Apple Investor News, and for Apple fanboys, there's Apple | Enthusiast.
The site is set up relatively simple, with different categories of news within the domain of the larger niche, and the site updates every fifteen minutes. Interestingly, while the site hasn't attracted monster amounts of visitor, much like AllTop and other similar sites, the stable of visitors are very loyal and constant. Unlike the publicly available statistics for similar sites, though, Frank tells me that the average visit time for users is measured in numbers of hours, instead of numbers of minutes (or even seconds) - an amazing feat. This trend of long-term engagement of the visitors to the site isn't a statistical anomaly, this site has been in a testing mode with a several thousand monthly unique visitors.