Gawker Media's Real Traffic
This quite severe-looking chart has been floating around this morning: it shows unique visitors to the front page of five Gawker Media sites, not all uniques to the site, and is based on Gawker Media internal stat pages (which are described as "broken" by the company). And everyone is making a big "Gawker is doomed" stink over it, but I don't buy the numbers being representative, really; see directly-measured Quantcast, above. (N.B. Trust Quantcast for directly measured traffic, as in this case, but not "sampled" traffic.)
Still, it's interesting that Denton is sending out pageview charts in response, as he doesn't care about pageviews. "Search traffic fell but organic traffic is robust," he said this morning. Here's pageviews on Gawker and Gizmodo over the last year.
What you start to suspect in some of the diversity between sites is that some of this isn't redesign-related.
One thing that supports the search traffic being down but the organic traffic being "robust" is seeing "people" down and pageviews up or steady (with Gizmodo being an exception):
Here's Jezebel, Kotaku io9 and Fleshbot, in pageviews:
And the same sites, in "people" visiting:
Let us not forget Jalopnik!
In people:
And in pageviews:
Usual disclaimers apply, yadda yadda.
If G*wker hadn't pulled that redesign, I never would have discovered The Awl. So now I sit over here, cradling my snifter of port and adjusting my monocle in disdain at "that petty gossip site with the horrid user-interface".
@TheRtHonPM Totally. I hated the redesign, and a commenter suggested I try The Awl. Reading this blog made me realize that it's not only the design that's changed about Gawker…the content has gone way downhill. It's…boring. Where did the humor go?
@TheRtHonPM Jezebel's redesign brought me here and to The Hairpin. Well, really it was the loss of witty commenters following the redesign.
Not sure if this is quote-unquote common knowledge, but if you really hate the design, ca.gawker.com (or ca.________) will get you to the old layout. I haven't figured out how to dick around with links, though, cause the hashbang doesn't translate to the old URLs.
@deepomega just delete the "#!" from the url and voila!
Hard for this reader to imagine Sir D's traffic-monitoring equipment being down for more than maybe 20 minutes before he started having seizures. These graphs may track that activity.
Here's the chart shows Gawker's internal statistics for unique visitors to the homepage of each site represented. That's the money chart.
But with the whole weird thing where chunks of the "home page" remain when you click on an individual link, how do they even distinguish between the two kinds of traffic?
Also unrelated to anything but YOU GUYS THERE IS A PICTURE OF AN AWL ON THE AWL, WHEN THE AWL IS BROKEN!
http://jfruh.com/images/awl.png
OMG THE BEST
I think the hashbang programming nonsense must have something to do with this. For a while the only gawker pages that were showing up in Google were mobile pages (no hashbang), then the full site pages started showing up again, but there are weird things going on. Like when you click back onto the homepage and you still have the article title in the browser title bar, etc.
@Bryan Keller Pretty much on target. To Nick Denton’s defense, the business he’s in is barely 16 years old. But in criticism of his “vision” he is a classic version of one of those techie non-techs who knows just enough to get in trouble with.
The whole JavaScript overhaul clearly looks like he read somewhere—or was told—that the “future” of the web would be JavaScript and Ajax focused. And it’s not a bad tact! I mean done correctly, one can create an amazing website that looks good and works well on desktop browsers as well as mobile devices. I’ve done it with careful use of CSS and Scriptaculous or jQuery as the JavaScript library. But the key is careful use. Gawker’s implementation of this burgeoning new standard is delusional and self-destructive.
You know what the problem is past any Gawker specifics? Scriptaculous or jQuery are already resource hogs on desktop machines if misused. Do it wrong for mobile devices and you have a 100% useless site. Heck, anyone here still using iBook G4s? How often does your CPU fan kick in when simply browsing a website and stops when you leave? That is when the JavaScript is stressing your local browser to the extreme. And I have accidentally done that dozens of times in development and then had to point it out to the client as something they should reconsider.
The Gawker redesign is appropriate for 2015 and not 2011. They need to scale back and create a structure they can grow into. Not the mess they have now.
@SpyMagician Exactly! Works great for Google Maps doesn't it? Problem is: Gawker doesn't have the resources that Google has to do it right. There are reasons that Google is Google beyond that "fancy" home page design.
@Niko Bellic Or a better example is Twitter: Look at how conceptually simple Twitter is. But then just think about the technical logistics of load balancing servers worldwide to handle user management, front-end display and back-end display. And Twitter actually learned the hard way since they launched with Ruby-on-Rails which is great for prototyping sites but 100% horrible in scalability.
But Gawker should have some comfort in their tech mishaps since the New York Times spent $40 million dollars on a paywall that is so easy to circumvent that it’s just not funny. The New York Times is supposed to be funny, right?
I used to work in the blog storefront.
I blogged everything before anyone.
I was there the time Doug Dechert almost got his ass beat.
I was there in Nolita during the great 2010 redesign clashes.
I woke up naked on the roofdeck in SoHo in 2008.
I heard you have a compilation of every good blog post ever done by anybody. Every great blog by Maggie. All the underground hits. All the Lockhart-era tracks. I heard you have a vinyl of every Jon Liu post on the Wayback Machine. I heard that you have a white label of every seminal Sploid and Johnston-Idolator hit – 2005, '06, '07.
But I'm losing my edge to better-looking blogs with better ideas and more talent.
And they're actually really, really nice.
I'm losing my edge.
I'M FUCKING BLOGGING PARADOX
-NO I'M NOT-
GCHATS WITH A FUCKING NEW-MEDIATRIX
RADAR, WRITIN’ AS I’M MOCKIN’ DEAD NEWSPAPERS
It was all a dream, I used to read Radar Magazine.
@Art Yucko Oh right like I'm gonna read Artie getting to Radar before I can. Spare me.
@fek The time has come, the time has come, the time has come today.
And so all the good bloggers wanna rescue.
All the small sites wanna talk to you.
All the clever Tweeters wanna tell you.
All the little people wanna complain, it's true.
Commenters block out the sun
Over me, over me
And spoil, spoil all the fun
won't you please?
It's just Us V. Them,
Over and over again.
Just think, there was a time when the Pavement reunion was an unbelievable pipe dream.
@fek Balk's Cock is playing at my house.
The fact that I don't really understand any of this is probably related to the fact that I'm too old to read Gawker anymore.
I really do hate the redesign, for what it's worth. Which, see above.
@Aatom I liked what you wrote on tumblr and everyone should read it.
"Or maybe people just aren’t visiting as often. I used to be one of those cyclical “ugh, the new Gawker is terrible” types, but I always came back for more.
Not anymore. The handful of times I’ve been there since the cover story redesign is when I’m directed to a specific story by someone, usually from Tumblr. I haven’t been a daily reader because it just doesn’t feel like a daily site anymore. Denton wanted a magazine feel and he got it. But most magazines sit in my bag unread for most of the week. They don’t feel urgent. My daily intake is still very much reverse-chronological."
I think that sums it up quite nicely.
@saythatscool Thanks! I do love that Choire always mounts a defense (however qualified) of his old digs, though. I remember when I thought, "he'll never be as good as Spiers." But he was! In different ways!
He might also be the reason I use too many exclamation marks now.
Too insidery.
I'm wondering how these numbers are affected by the annoying new cross-linking methodology. If one sees a blurb on Gawker for an interesting article on Jezebel (har har), clicking on the link gets an interstitial Gawker page with the same blurb. One must click yet again to get to the actual article.
@BadUncle something similar happens if you're in Canada. If you click on a link you're taken to a ca.______.com/ url but the "#!" is included so it just takes you to the old layout of the homepage. you have to erase the "#!" from the url and then click again to view the post (or erase the "ca.").
Some running averages on those graphs would be a huge help.
Gawker is simply writing much, much less than they were a year ago. No wonder they have less front-page traffic; they are putting up fewer total posts, and the posts they are putting up are shorter. See the chart on page 2 of this story for details:
http://scallywagandvagabond.com/2011/03/the-gawker-redesign-by-the-numbers-how-gawker-failed/
I still check it out on an almost daily basis, but the layout still makes my brain bleed and almost half the time I click on something to read, nothing happens.
I feel bad for the writers. (The ones I like, anyway.)
The harder he tries to make it Essential and Now, the more Embarrassingly Yesterday it becomes.
Of the dozen or so people I know who were reading gawker sites before the Nickocalypse (including myself), only two are still doing so. It's good to know the other 10 are just statistical anomalies!
Does the unique page hits have anything to do with their genius content plan to just spam lots more more copied urls with tiny attribution at the bottom?
I used to faithfully read Gawker & Jez, but the redesign killed it. That, and they turned too elitist for their own good. When you are a on a horse that high, it's a long way to fall. It's irritating that they dug in their heels are refuse to change the site back to something readable. I might return if they did, but I'm thrilled to have become a loyal Awl/Hairpin reader.
@starwitness Me, too, exactly! I have trouble with the group think that's happening on Jez recently. If you don't fit with the standard view that a college-educated upper-middle class women who feels guilty about her privilege has on a topic, you better not comment. Anything related to race ends badly and now a lot of things related to children do, too.
I'm new to here, from there. Gawker.ca still has the old layout, but all the problems of the new layout. Its the best and the worst.