Bloggasm

Reading Markos Moulitsas’ blog post on Daily Kos the other day, I couldn’t help but detect a sense of utter relief. The Daily Kos founder had launched a major site redesign within the last month and he knew the stakes were high. In the post he embedded two screen grabs: 1. The traffic data for Digg after it launched its Version 4 (widely thought to be an abysmal failure), and 2. The traffic data for Gawker.com, which launched its own redesign earlier this month. Both cases painted a drastic picture of how easy it is to alienate readers when rolling out a plethora of features at once. But then Moulitsas displayed his own site’s stats:

we’ve had … steady traffic. No systemic collapse … We may have even gotten a bit of a boost, though I’m going to credit Wisconsin for that. Bottom line, we didn’t suffer a Digg- or Gawker-style collapse. The Daily Kos audience stuck with the site.

Meanwhile, Gawker founder Nick Denton issued his own post commenting on his recent redesign, and this one wasn’t as rosy. He addresses several criticisms against the redesign (here are my own I made a few weeks ago) and what he’ll do to fix it. This includes making it much easier for readers to switch back to the “classic” pre-redesign view of the blog.

After the launch in early February, Denton made a bet with another blogger: “I’m on the record that I think the redesigns will fail. And I’m now officially opening the betting pool. I think Denton is going to be forced to pull back on this. If anyone wants to wager that the redesign don’t get yanked back (or greatly modified) by, let’s say, June 1… I’ll take your bet.”

So does this mean Denton lost the bet?

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Though the debut of Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily received widespread press coverage, it was treated more as a novelty than an actual attempt at creating a viable news organization. Most tech pundits quickly dismissed it if they hadn’t already pre-launch. Bloggers gleefully listed other failed Rupert Murdoch internet ventures and a quick rundown of the newsonomics of the venture found that there’s really not much of a market for an expensively-run tablet-only newspaper. The sale of Huffington Post to AOL was met with slightly less pessimism, but few writers outright declared that the move would save AOL. Demand Media’s high IPO was met with much derision and a widespread assumption that its days are numbered.

In fact the only major launch of a news product that was met with widespread praise has been TBD, which recently disappointed everyone with the announcement that it would be laying off most its staff.

I was thinking of all this pessimism when reading this Adweek piece on the merger between the Daily Beast and Newsweek. Count me among a group — comprised of nearly everyone — who assumes the merger will fail to do anything to make either publication profitable. Given this, Adweek questions why the New York Times decided to promote the merger on its front page:

Anyone outside of New York City’s media fishbowl could be forgiven for waking up last Monday and wondering what the heck some lady named Tina Brown was doing on the front page of The New York Times. In the 21st century, Brown has edited a failed magazine, hosted a failed talk show, written one well-received book, and launched a Web site that loses an estimated $10 million a year and attracts relatively few readers. Even Jeremy Peters, the author of the Times article, acknowledged that Brown’s greatest achievements—as editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker back in the 20th century—were long behind her.

Even in the case of The New Yorker, the magazine wasn’t even profitable until Brown left and David Remnick took over. I don’t think it’s mean-spirited or jumping the gun to assume that this latest media venture will not be a success.

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Earlier today I wrote in a piece on The Next Web that Gawker Media has seemingly removed its openly-displayed Sitemeter statistics on all its blogs, perhaps so nosy media reporters can’t get the inside track on how well the new redesign is performing. Well it turns out that’s only half true. Though the sites don’t appear to offer a link to the sitemeter stats, you can still currently access them if you know the URL to the stats. I know I’ll be personally bookmarking all these permalinks:

1. io9

2. Jalopnik

3. Gawker

4. Gizmodo

5. Lifehacker

6. Jezebel

7. Kotaku

8. Deadspin

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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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