![]() ![]() Speaking of sacred cows: Today, we relaunch Valleywag, our site dedicated to mocking the stupidity, incompetence, and avarice of Silicon Valley and the gargantuan grift known as the "tech sector." The young and furious Sam Biddle, late of Gizmodo, will run the site. We won't always be right, but we will always be honest. But we will continue to try to puncture egos and butcher sacred cows and jump on radioactive stories without regard to consequences, careers, or the intricate ethical straitjackets so many in our profession impress themselves with. We will continue to publish ridiculous, time-wasting things because we are ridiculous people who like to waste time, ours and yours. One of the old proposed but not adopted slogans for the site was, “Honesty is our only virtue.” I like that.Ĭonsider that slogan adopted. And I sincerely believe this is noble, even if we sometimes surround it in a bunch of cat videos. Amid all the funny things and time-wasting things and ridiculous things we publish, we tell the truth, in far more direct way than readers can find in most other places. I think that this is ultimately Gawker’s most important role in the media. If something is bullshit, we can say “this is bullshit." We’re not required to hem and haw and couch what we want to say in euphemisms. The thing I like most about Gawker is that we are able to dispense with all of the politesse bullshit that surrounds so much establishment journalism and just speak the truth (as we see it, at least). Hamilton Nolan, our longest-serving staffer, is a far better writer than me (or you), so I'll let him say it: We have the advantage of independence, and an institutional aversion to cozy relationships with our peers, and when we're at our best we deploy both to say things that others are unable or unwilling to say. But at its core, it has always been committed to stripping back the veneer and assailing shibboleth. Gawker has adopted a number of different personalities over the course of its 10 ( ish?) year history, from sneering New York media outsider to sneering New York media insider to sneering enfant terrible to sneering group lifecasting blog to sneering national news site. But let's start with what's not changing. As you can see, a few things are different around here this morning. Sports blog Deadspin hasn’t had any additional declines in traffic since introducing the new layout, and Lifehacker actually seems to have had a slight uptick.Īs a whole, while there’s no way to know if the drop off in traffic is a result of a mass exodus of commenters or a mass drop in pages included in Google, something has to change again if Denton wants to hang on to pageviews and the $1000 he bet on them.Same as the old Gawker. Fleshbot (Quantcast link, safe for work), the porn blog which did not adopt the new layout has had stable traffic levels for most of the month. Io9, the sci-fi blog in the Gawker network, introduced the new layout earlier than other sites, and the decline in traffic is stark. On more than a few blogs, including Gawker itself, it seems that the network is trying to find a middle ground that features larger images and headlines for featured stories, but more of them than the much derided single story layout. While every redesign normally finds a vocal group expressing their outrage (Facebook, Starbucks, anyone?), judging by the drop off in traffic this may be a redesign that needs to be rethought. ![]() That may point to frustrations from commenters, who have been vocal about their dislike for the new layout that makes individual commenters more difficult to follow, and generally makes it harder to follow conversations on individual stories. Facebook is one of those sites, making it a bit more difficult for any particularly salacious stories to spread virally.įor a brief period of time, this made stories disappear from Google News, and while that issue has been rectified, it doesn’t look like traffic is rebounding. Essentially, even though you see one individual story for each URL, search spiders and other websites may see it as one part of the same, giant page. In laymens terms, for some search engines and websites, it replaces an individual page for each post with a placeholder. Part of the reason may lie in the new URL structure which uses a hash bang (#!). The downward path this chart takes corresponds with the rollout of the new Gawker design, which trades the reverse chronological layout typical of most blogs for a  single story layout with headlines in a smaller bar on the right. ![]() At least for now, Denton is losing his bet. We placed our bets on Gawker as a possibility for the next blog network to be acquired, and founder Nick Denton placed his money on a new redesign that was supposed to take the 9 sites that make up the network beyond the blog by highlighting exclusives and driving more traffic to them. Share this by Email Retweet on Facebook on LinkedIn ![]()
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