Bloggasm

For a niche that has such strong competition among blogs, there’s no doubt that Gizmodo and Engadget are by far the kings of gadget news. Gizmodo alone receives several million pageviews a day and recently broke the news that Google’s Eric Schmidt and Apple’s Steve Jobs had met outside a cafe. So imagine the surprise when Apple decided to “snub” (as some blogs put it) the editors at these publications by not sending them iPads to review. According to Business Insider, “Gizmodo editor Brian Lam was already on a plane to New York yesterday when Apple canceled on him at the last minute.” Some have speculated that Apple was trying to appeal to a more mass audience rather than gadget geeks who would just nitpick over its features. But were these gadget bloggers upset about the so-called “snub”? I emailed Gizmodo’s Brian Lam last night to request an interview, and he responded with this:

Hey Simon, I”d rather not comment on the story. Not much to it. They don’t owe us anything and we don’t owe them anything. No big deal.
You can quote me on that, actually.

Duly quoted.

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One waits for memos from Nick Denton because behind the updates and milestones he lists for Gawker Media you can get a glance — if you read between the lines — of his underlying assumptions about online media and its inherent worth. With such precise Internet metrics, publishers and advertisers have learned over the last few years that the emperor truly has no clothes, but Denton seems always in search of real garments with which to dress his Majesty.

Below is a memo sent to his bloggers boasting of recent pageview spikes, but with all these positive bullet points there is the addendum that page views alone are no longer going to cut it.

From: Nick Denton
Subject: Nearly!
To: edit@gawker.com
Date: Wednesday, December 2, 2009, 12:36 PM

Just a shade off 400m pageviews in November. Damn. Close. To put that in perspective, Los Angeles Times is somewhere between 100m and 200m. New York Times is about 1bn. In web traffic, we’re somewhere in between. Not bad for a bunch of scrappy bloggers!

io9 sucked those Twilight vampires dry. The scifi site continues to run at twice the traffic of this time last year. It’s now twice the size of Boing Boing, the closest competitor — a site which has been around since the beginning of the blogs. io9’s growth means that we now have not a single site under 20m pageviews a month. (The threshold of success used to be 1m!)

The ESPN controversy and other stories seem to have left Deadspin at a consistently higher level than the summer. It’s also doubled in traffic. If you needed any more evidence that scoops are rewarded, here it is. Deadspin has largely abandoned the blog filler. The site is down to 20 posts a day. But they’re damn good posts.

The other big standout: Fleshbot. The site got a boost from the Awards party at The Box — and the coverage thereof. But the Miss Universe threeway didn’t hurt either. Fleshbot had been stagnant for a couple of years. It’s now on the move again. The turnaround — and the recent performance of Gizmodo and Gawker — show that even our most established sites have plenty of potential.

One little footnote. Pageviews have been our standard measure of success. They’re easy to understand. The Sitemeter numbers update throughout the day. But we do need to recognize that not all pageviews are created equal. A slideshow view is not worth as much as a click from Twitter or Facebook or Digg which brings a new reader to us. Expect more emphasis in 2010 on clicks through from external sites — and the “uniques” which measure of the number of people that we reach. We can’t just satisfy our existing regulars; we have to recruit new ones.

So start paying more attention to this list.

Nick

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With all the reporting on journalist layoffs, I’ve always hoped that someone would try to compile statistics on how many full time bloggers are out there (would that number make the journalist layoff numbers less depressing?). Still no dice on those statistics, but the New York Times is more than happy to serve up the story full of anecdotes about how well blog networks are doing.

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A memo from Gawker’s managing editor

From: Gabriel Snyder
Date: July 27, 2009 3:22:47 PM EDT
Subject: Meet Gawker’s new West Coast Editor

Ever since Defamer was merged into Gawker earlier this year, I’ve been looking for the right person to hire in L.A., so I’m pleased to announce someone who was worth the wait: Richard Rushfield is joining Gawker as its new West Coast Editor. From his Venice bungalow he’ll proudly fly the Defamer flag as well as pitch in with charting the general editorial direction of the site.

Richard joins us from the Los Angeles Times where he’s been the Entertainment Editor of their web site since 2005. While that paper has had its fair share of internal changes — and lots of meetings, I’m told — Richard put together one of its true bright points, overseeing a staff of writers and reporters who work primarily for latimes.com and attack the kinds of stories that are as relevant to industry insiders as they are entertaining and insightful to a national audience.

Like any good generalist, Richard’s career has spanned a number of worlds. He’s done political campaign organizing, worked as a reality show producer, has a prolific freelancing career for magazines including Vanity Fair, Details, Los Angeles, Blackbook and Arena, co-founded satire magazine LA Innuendo (“a low-rent Spy for people who love the things that they hate about LA”), published On Spec: A Novel of Young Hollywood, and has Don’t Follow Me, I’m Lost, a memoir of his college years, due out this November.

After some much-deserved decompression, Richard will be starting with us on August 31. Please join me in welcoming him aboard.

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TMZ Brings Ad Sales In-House With Telepictures; Future After AOL Spinoff Under Spotlight

TMZ.com has been profitable since it launched, but remains to be seen how it looks this year and next, especially if it goes completely independent of AOL. No one would confirm the revenues, but they are likely in the $15 million range. AOL still drives a lot of traffic to it, but TMZ now has to compete with AOL’s own celeb portal Popeater, among others, and one source says the contracted number of AOL homepage placements have gone down, though TMZ says it got a lot of promotion during the Michael Jackson story. The two sites differ in tone: TMZ is focused on hard-hitting breaking news, while Popeater is a more advertiser-friendly venue focused on soft-focus stories and celeb interviews. AOL still has a prominent link to TMZ in its main navigation—and other places—which it is contractually obligated to, so that will continue.

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I find this hard to believe:

AOL’s PoliticsDaily Quickly Surpasses Rival Politico, MediaGlow Sites Continue To Grow

AOL’s new political news and blog site, PoliticsDaily.com has surpassed rival Politico.com in unique visits in May, after being launched only a month and a half ago. According to May’s comScore results, PoliticsDaily.com received 2.4 million unique visitors compared to 1.1 million unique visitors on Politico.com in May. PoliticsDaily, a “news magazine” site which primarily focuses on in-depth political commentary as opposed to breaking news, provides only original content, from long-form analysis to blog posts on issues in the U.S. political landscape. You can read our original review of PoliticsDaily here.

This is a big deal for AOL and representative of the company’s ambitions to become a dominant player in the online content space. PoliticsDaily is the brainchild of Martin Moe, senior vice president at AOL and is built under Bill Wilson’s new MediaGlow division, which is building new content brands distinct from AOL itself. MediaGlow, which recently launched topic directory Love.com, runs AOL News, Engadget and TMZ.com, among other properties.

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When the book on 21st century media is written, the day that a writer from the esteemable New Yorker, considered by many to be the most important magazine published, dipped her toes into the unchlorinated pool that is Gawker, will be noted as the day that old journalism was irrevocably adulterated. Not to issue a quote, mind you, but an entire 600-word guest post defending the labyrinthine, secretive modus operandi of the New Yorker institution.

What drew Susan Orlean — staff writer since 1986 and author of the excellent The Orchid Thief — into the welcoming arms of the media gossip site? It was Dan Baum, who decided over a week ago to tweet the story of his “firing” from the magazine.

What I’d really like to know is how this guest post came about. Surely Orlean would not have done this without a nod from those atop the invisible masthead (rumor has it that the New Yorker’s masthead exists between the 45th and 46th page of the magazine, just as John Cusack’s character in Being John Malkovich works on the 7 1/2 floor of an office building). Was this an approved hit job, signed off by David Remnick himself?