I know that First Look Media is going to play host to more than just this one publication (if you look at the homepage, there is a blog post from Matt Taibbi talking about his new collaboration with the organization), but that arrangement is not unique to First Look. It doesn't take a lot of effort to come up with a whole host of publications that operate under larger corporate umbrellas but which are accessible via their own independent domain name, even when they share resources with other sites. And I can't think of a single publication that is set up the way that The Intercept is.
I'm a longtime Greenwald reader (back from when he first joined Salon.com), and yet I don't think I have visited The Intercept's homepage directly (typing out the url myself) even once since it got off the ground. I don't know why I haven't; I guess it just feels amateurish to nest a substantive news site inside a boring corporate holding company website. It feels like they don't care about building "The Intercept" as a meaningful brand, and as a result I probably don't want to build any personal loyalty to a brand that feels like it might just go away. I say this as someone who completely supports the effort.
I also wonder how this might impact their search results, given that the firstlook.org homepage is effectively a non-entity, and each subdirectory will need to be separately indexed as separate site (for instance, firstlook.org/theinterscept/ has its own sitemap.xml).
What's even weirder to me is that it seems like they even own theintercept.com, which is currently redirecting to firstlook.org/theintercept/. Why don't they use it? It can't only be me. This has to be affecting their readership.