One useful thing that Business Insider honcho Henry Blodget has done is make somewhat public "how much websites make." The answers may surprise you, and here, in his profile of Blodget (subscription-only; you should subscribe!), Ken Auletta does a rather amazing drive-by round-up of Business Insider, Huffington Post and Gawker Media.
A natural disaster is a time for class, dignity, exchange of news instead of rumor (ahem, oh well) and a sense of humor where warranted. (Everyone's mileage will vary on what's funny and when, of course. One mild ill-timed joke, and you're the most-hated person on Twitter.) With millions of people without power, low-lying areas flooded and some generally scary stuff going on, it's a little tense! The good news is, here in New York City most workplaces are being sensible with their employees—I mean, they kind of have to be, given that no one can go anywhere, what with every subway tunnel flooded.
But then there's bad [...]
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 [...]
"The Hungarian companies get all of ___'s international income, which flows in from 13 different salespeople in ten different countries and which, since it’s international income flowing to a Hungarian company owned by a Cayman Islands parent, is basically pure profit which never comes close to being taxed in the U.S. The result is a company where 130 U.S. employees eat up the lion’s share of the U.S. revenues, resulting in little if any taxable income, while the international income, the franchise value of the brands, and the value of the technology all stays permanently overseas, untouched by the IRS." The answer may surprise (and/or bore) you.
Here's Nick Dentons's memo on today's top Gawker story, an anonymous first-person account of a date with politician Christine O'Donnell, celebrating its "brilliant packaging" and other fine qualities. His advice for journalists: "it's better to get out of the way of the pictures."
Another terrific monthly wrap-up email from Gawker Media honcho Nick Denton to his staff! One item that will surprise you: "There's too much news on the web; and way too little explanation." Intrigued? Want to… win the mornings? Read on!
When Gizmodo editor Jason Chen's computer was seized Friday night (as part of the investigation into Apple's missing/stolen iPhone), after the issuance of a search warrant, Gawker Media's lawyer/COO Gaby Darbyshire claimed that the warrant was invalid, due to reporter privilege. She may actually be correct! If the police are seeking "unpublished information," which they clearly are through the seizure, then they would seem to be in violation of California evidence code. Nick Denton's memo to the staff, issued this afternoon, is his shortest to date: "Sorry to keep you in the dark about this until we were ready to go public. We were trying to resolve [...]
On the night after the Heaven's Gate UFO cultists were discovered dead by mass suicide in a San Diego suburban McMansion, I was standing in a dark patch of the Presidio, watching the Hale-Bopp comet and its forked tail over the Marin Headlands. Someone passed around binoculars, somebody else passed a little pipe around, and after a half hour everyone was cold and bored and we drifted back to the battleship-gray Victorian on Haight Street that I shared with a rotating group of five or six pals.
My bedroom was just a large closet on the upper floor, with enough room for a narrow mattress and a chest [...]
The teaser for tonight's "Rock Center with Brian Williams" very special episode on Gawker Media is the most mindbogglingly dumb thing I've ever seen. It features reporter Jamie Gangel acting like a prosecutor, with all her notes bundled in her hand. She is also holding a pen? Just in case she wants to jot down some notes. After reading off a list of adjectives, to get "unapologetic" Gawker honcho Nick Denton to word-associate with them, or whatever, she then presents her case: "these blogs pay for salacious scoops, publish rumors, settle lawsuits when they have to, and if they get it wrong, they simply update."
To illustrate that when [...]
Gabriel Snyder, now head of Atlantic Wire, who was fired to make room for current Gawker editor Remy Stern, incited the wrath of his successor last night—by wondering about the traffic results of Gawker's takedown of Congressman Chris Lee. To the digital record! .bbpBox35551819744681984 {background:url(http://a3.twimg.com/a/1297205904/images/themes/theme1/bg.png) #9ae4e8;padding:20px;} p.bbpTweet{background:#fff;padding:10px 12px 10px 12px;margin:0;min-height:48px;color:#000;font-size:18px !important;line-height:22px;-moz-border-radius:5px;-webkit-border-radius:5px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata{display:block;width:100%;clear:both;margin-top:8px;padding-top:12px;height:40px;border-top:1px solid #fff;border-top:1px solid #e6e6e6} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author{line-height:19px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author img{float:left;margin:0 7px 0 0px;width:38px;height:38px} p.bbpTweet a:hover{text-decoration:underline}p.bbpTweet span.timestamp{font-size:12px;display:block}
Gawker's latest scalp didn't come with eyeballs: Sitemeter shows slight traffic bump http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=sm5gawkerless than a minute ago via Twitter for iPhoneGabriel Snydergabrielsnyder
For those playing along at home, Gawker Media settled with Sarah Palin's publisher, HarperCollins, last night. I would propose that the settlement consisted of Gawker saying "Yes, we already took the book excerpts down, don't push it," accompanied by a check made out to HarperCollins for zero dollars.
There are many ways to read today's New Yorker profile of Nick Denton, a New York City-based man who runs a network of popular websites. I think the best way I've found to read it so far is this one: print it out, or to otherwise somehow obtain a printed copy of the piece, and then highlight (perhaps in yellow?) all the quotes by Denton himself. As with all previous Denton profiles-and it's not a fault of these profiles or the writers, I don't think!-you will come searching for a "why" and you may again come away frustrated on a quick read. And yet still, when this one [...]
Confederate Motors and Gawker Media have reached a settlement in the motorcycle maker's libel claim (which is well-described here). It got a little heated along the way! There was a correspondence of the cattiest variety. Wrote the lawyer for the motorcycle maker: "In my opinion, your ability to research 'journalistic' sources is equalled only by your ability to research legal proceedings." Replied Gawker Media: "I cannot be bullied," etc., pursuing this will be bad for your client, that kind of thing. Love it. And now that they've settled? Well! Writes Ben Sheffner at Copyrights & Campaigns: "according to PACER, that leaves only one live case pending [...]
A couple of times in the last month, Gawker Media sites have been all, "Hey that piece on your site was great, can we syndicate it?" Now, I am old. And for us olds, "syndication" is a term of art in the world of publishing things. In this scheme, people who are self-employed make a living by selling their work, for usually small fees, to a number of different publishers. It's how things called "comics" used to work in newspapers (and currently "don't work" most likely). And columnists, and such. Not a bad system for all involved. And now there is a new kind of syndication, as explained [...]
Last week, Gawker Media's swank SoHo office had no water. Today, the employees that actually come to the office to work on a Monday morning discovered that they had no Internet. That's rough, for an Internet company. (BuzzFeed's internet was also out this morning, though now restored, not that really anyone there would have known, because who could face their awful, slow, impossible elevators on a Monday morning?) But really the question is: What will the third cataclysm of Gawker Media be?
Last night, Gawker Media held its first real company-wide meeting at the Crosby Hotel screening room, down in the hotel's swank basement. Honcho Nick Denton gave a speech from the stage—just like a real grown-up company, and also totally not.
"His pep talk amounted to showing a chart of upward linear growth and telling us it wasn't good enough," said one employee. "But what do you expect from Nick—is he going to go around and rub everybody's shoulders?"
No. He is not. Denton should feel good that he came off as a real hardass. Everyone knows where they stand now: grow (more!) or get out. And another principle he [...]
Because my goal is for all of you to be semi-fluent in code, because if you are not at least vaguely proficient, the coming decades will leave you behind, I expect you all to read this take on the Gawker redesign, Javascript and hashbang URLs—a situation that the author, web developer Mike Davies, calls an "architectural nightmare." There will be a quiz. (One current outcome of the Gawker Media site redesign? Nothing they publish appears in Google News at this time.) Seriously, it's possible for the layperson to read this without smelling toast, I promise!
So, Gawker got sued again—this time by HarperCollins, for publishing excerpts from “America By Heart,” Sarah Palin’s latest contribution to the annals of American thought. The book doesn’t come out until tomorrow, but Gawker posted segments of it last week, mostly in order to make fun of them. Some people got upset! On Saturday, a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order against Gawker. So the page with the excerpts from the book is down.
So what’s going on here? Does Gawker have a First Amendment right to excerpt Sarah Palin’s book and make fun of it? Or can Sarah Palin use her powers under copyright law [...]
The latest traffic memo arrives from Gawker Media honcho Nick Denton: in it, Comscore shows that his network of sites is bigger than any newspaper online but the New York Times. That being said? "The newspapers are now the least of our competition. The inflated expectations of investors and executives may one day explode the Huffington Post. And Yahoo and AOL are in long-term decline. But they are all increasingly in our business."
