Bloggasm

At the beginning of the year Gawker Media announced it would start paying writers based on the number of page views their posts generated. In other words, on top of their base rate writers would get an additional “bonus” that would directly correlate with how many page loads were generated for posts with their bylines. Some were skeptical when this new pay system was introduced, arguing that this would encourage the writers to engage in gimmicks that would pump up page views but would do little to improve the blog’s brand.

So now that six months have passed, has the new system resulted in increased traffic? To find this out I analyzed Site Meter statistics for 11 Gawker Media blogs (I didn’t include Io9 since it only recently launched). Overall, traffic for all Gawker blogs combined saw a 40% increase in page views. Each individual blog experienced an average increase of 49%.

Valleywag and Jezebel saw the highest percentage increases, both with 83%. Deadspin saw the lowest percentage increase with 23%.

Below are the statistics for the individual blogs:

Gawker:

Second half of 2007: 60,074,123
First half of 2008: 100,584,717
An increase of 40,510,594, or 67%

Kotaku:

Second half of 2007: 142,585,536
First half of 2008: 210,194,200
An increase of 67,608,664, or 47%

Deadspin:

Second half of 2007: 51,477,017
First half of 2008: 63,260,347
An increase of 11,783,330, or 23%

Valleywag:

Second half of 2007: 14,352,299
First half of 2008: 26,307,594
An increase of 11,955,295, or 83%

Jezebel:

Second half of 2007: 49,007,035
First half of 2008: 89,563,357
An increase of 40,556,322, or 83%

Defamer:

Second half of 2007: 26,451,631
First half of 2008: 39,393,258
An increase of 12,941,627, or 49%

Lifehacker:

Second half of 2007: 106,480,394
First half of 2008: 136,855,806
An increase of 30,375,412, or 29%

Gizmodo:

Second half of 2007: 314,144,941
First half of 2008: 408,311,543
An increase of 94,166,602, or 30%

Jalopnik:

Second half of 2007: 51,000,183
First half of 2008: 72,445,787
An increase of 21,445,604, or 42%

Consumerist:

Second half of 2007: 47,727,880
First half of 2008: 70,082,654
An increase of 22,354,774, or 47%

Fleshbot:

Second half of 2007: 84,319,857
First half of 2008: 108,755,591
An increase of 24,435,734, or 29%