It was the biggest scoop in Hollywood last week.

Sharon Waxman reported on her website, TheWrap, that Nikki Finke was fired from rival show biz site, Deadline Hollywood. Finke quickly shot back that she was only out of town and going on vacation.

But behind this skirmish in the longstanding war between the two, is the battle for Web traffic. And one juicy tidbit that never came up in all the coverage of Finke’s possible departure from Deadline: Finke’s site is far more popular than Waxman’s.

Last month, almost twice as many people went to Deadline.com – 2.4 million – as TheWrap.com, which had 1.3 million visitors, according to Web traffic firm Comscore Inc.

On last week’s Alexa.com’s ranking of popular U.S. websites, Deadline was No. 976 and TheWrap was No. 2,399.

Finke has managed to set the agenda with her stories – and her attitude, said Gabe Kahn, a professor of journalism at USC.

“In the core industry audience, Nikki Finke has multiple times the street cred as Sharon Waxman,” he said.

However, he noted that Hollywood street cred has more to do with finding the hot stories than getting them right.

Still, Waxman’s site has been gaining ground on Deadline – and the Finke story will no doubt help. Visitors to TheWrap grew 81 percent from May of last year to last month, according to Comscore. Deadline’s growth was slower, with the number of visitors increasing 25 percent year over year. Waxman’s story of Finke’s alleged ouster was posted June 2, so is not reflected in those numbers.

Both sites cover a lot of the same ground – a steady diet of news and deals of interest to industry insiders, with advertising from studios and networks. The sites are also the focal points of intensely loyal communities that take to the comments section to defend or bash the subjects of stories – as well as Finke and Waxman.

Earlier this year, Deadline’s parent company, Penske Media Corp., purchased trade publication Variety, which then took down its paywall and is vying for a bigger piece of the digital pie.

If Finke is indeed on the way out, it would only further shake the industry, and could present a significant branding challenge for Deadline, which is defined by Finke’s voice.

“Without Nikki Finke and her fangs, I don’t know what that site is,” said a Hollywood public relations executive.

He spoke on condition of anonymity because, he said, she’s vindictive.

When Finke, a former Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly entertainment writer, launched Deadline in 2006, it was an Internet shot at the dominant print trade papers, Variety and Hollywood Reporter.

Finke’s aggressive style won the site plenty of fans, who came back again and again throughout the day for her stories, some of them tagged with her go-to catchphrase, “Toldja,” to show that she had reported the news before anyone else.

It also inspired competition from Waxman, a former New York Times reporter who launched TheWrap in 2009.

It didn’t take long for Finke to dismiss Waxman’s site, claiming it was not a force in the entertainment industry.

Finke, thanks to her snarky comments on the careers of entertainment bigwigs, has created a distinct identity. HBO even tried to develop a series based on the antics of a reclusive Hollywood entertainment reporter. Everyone knew it was modeled on Finke. It was never produced.

Some say that’s put her at odds with Jay Penske, the chief of her parent company. He faces the challenge of balancing Deadline with Variety – a trade publication that depends on industry advertising.

Finke, for her part, wrote on Deadline last week that the former was not an issue: “He knows I’m a bitch. That’s why he bought me.”

Penske emailed Waxman that all of her facts were wrong.

But he didn’t say Finke was staying, either, Waxman reported.

Penske and Finke did not return a request for comment.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Finke has a window to opt out of her contract.

Waxman isn’t backing down. She declined to discuss the issue with the Business Journal, but in an email said: “We stand behind our reporting.”