We have such terrible metrics for judging websites! There's income, and there's traffic, and that's about it. But neither of those take into account burn rate, overall expenditure or organization size, just for starters. One way to look at things might be: unique visitors per month, divided by employees. Size of staff is something of a predictor of size of traffic, it turns out! If you have no staff, you cannot make the traffic, for one thing. Obviously there's a slight variable in this metric—which has to do with number of part-time contributors, freelance and marketing budgets and, of course, certainly at the big behemoth, unpaid contributors. Speaking of, let's look at the Huffington Post! READ MORE

Yesterday, Amazon made Nielsen Bookscan information from just the last four weeks of sales available to authors. (Bookscan tracks most booksellers, but not WalMart/Sam's Club, museum stores, etc.—the general disclaimer is they get about 75% of sales.) And, for the most part, it's killing people! If you had a book that just came out, the tool is maybe useful: you can see where it's selling, and then I guess you... could call that bookstore in Denver? And say "Hey thanks for hand-selling those five copies of my book"? For the vast majority of authors, whose books have been out for six months or three years, the live recent data is just upsetting. (Because people don't buy a lot of books!) And it's freaking out publishers, too—who we hear have scheduled emergency meetings to Discuss This Event and Then Do What Exactly, I Mean, It's Book Publishing, Let's Continue This Discussion Over Lunch and Then Maybe Some Drinks, Hmm, I Guess Maybe Authors Might Have Questions About Their Royalty Statements Down the Road, Oh Boy.

"We all know that some pageviews are worth more than others," writes Gawker Media honcho Nick Denton today in an internal memo. "Think of an exclusive such as Gawker's embassy hazing pics, Deadspin's expose of ESPN's horndoggery, Gizmodo's first look of the new Microsoft tablet or io9's Avatar review. An item which gets picked up and draws in new visitors is worth more than a catnip slideshow that our existing readers can't help but click upon." READ MORE