Gawker Media founder Nick Denton revealed today that the company’s traffic is down by nearly a quarter as a result of the recent widely publicized redesign. 

The design, explained by Gawker here, took a fresh almost tablet-like navigation approach to serving up content – where articles are loaded onto the screen without actually leaving the page. 

Many thought the move would have a huge (and negative) impact on Gawker’s pageviews, which it seemingly has so far. There have also been plenty of complaints among readers, but that’s to be expected with any redesign. You can’t fault them too much for trying something different than the norm. 

Joe Pompeo at Yahoo News reports on an interview Felix Salmon did with Denton at the PaidContent event today:

"We’re probably down by about 25 percent," Denton told Reuters blogger Felix Salmon during a Q&A session. "I’m pretty confident we’re gonna be coming back."

As for revenues: "We set the targets flat on last year so the sales people wouldn’t be demoralized by the inevitable disruption," he said. "We knew this was going to be traumatic." Nevertheless, he notes that "our overlying business is pretty strong."

In a memo to Gawker staff (published by Business Insider), Denton said, "Obviously, the reduction in traffic from Google — as from most design changes — has been significant. It doesn’t affect readers of the site — but it does have a disproportionate effect on uniques. Search optimization of the new layout is a top priority."

Much of the memo also addressed performance issues, so it’s possible that could have played some role, even if minor, in the search traffic. Google, as you may know, counts site speed as a ranking factor now. 

Denton recently made a bet with Rex Sorgatz that Gawker’s pageviews will increase with the new design. Denton recently addressed this on Twitter:

It will certainly be interesting to see if Gawker can recover. Denton seems pretty intent on keeping the design around for a while, and he also mentioned that he won’t be selling out to a big corporation anytime soon. 

Original Article: Former NFL player and ESPN analyst Sean Salisbury has seemingly made some big waves in the blogosphere by threatening to sue Gawker Media-owned sports blog Deadspin (not to mention ESPN itself).

Deadspin has posted a slew of what the blog claims is messages from Sean Salisbury, sent from his iPhone, in which he threatens legal action (in a very grammatically incorrect way). By slew, I mean a seemingly never-ending chain of tantrum-fueled, vengeful, threats. Interestingly enough, the whole thing is aimed at restoring Salisbury’s reputation, which he claims has been tarnished in large part by Deadspin, who has referenced alleged incidents from the past in which Salisbury showed cell phone pictures of his penis to employees of ESPN.

I cannot attest to the accuracy of such allegations, but if these messages to Deadspin really are from Salisbury, I have to say, he’s not doing a very good job of managing said reputation. If he sent them, he would have had to assume they would end up being posted at the site (from the same company that produces Valleywag, mind you). To get an idea of what we’re talking about here, read Deadspin’s posts here and here. I would provide a sample, but I wouldn’t know where to begin. There are so many of them.

Meanwhile, people on the web seem to be having a good time at Salisbury’s expense:

Now because of the rantings, people are talking about Salisbury more than they ever would have otherwise. He is even showing up on Google’s Hot Trends multiple times. It’s certainly putting him in the spotlight, but if it’s his reputation he’s worried about (again, assuming these messages really did come from him), he’s got a thing or two to learn about online reputation management practices. I wonder how long it will take to recover his reputation after this. Now it’s not going to be only articles about him showing his penis showing up in Google results. It’s going to be articles about him showing his penis and articles about him raving like a madman (regardless of whether or not he ever showed his penis to begin with).

Currently, the top two natural results on Google are Salisbury’s Wikipedia entry, and a Deadspin article called "If Sean Salisbury Asks You to Look at his Phone, Don’t do it." It doesn’t get much better after that. By the way, the Wikipedia article also mentions the penis incident.

 Nick Denton

As reported by Jim Romenesko, Denton admitted to his employees yesterday, "February 2009 wasn’t nearly as dreadful as it could have been.  A lot of sites struck traffic records — including io9, Gawker, Deadspin, Jalopnik and Jezebel.  In total, we drew 297m pageviews — some 34% over last February’s level and 50% up if you account for the sites we spun off in the meantime."

Gawker Media apparently saw an improvement in its bottom line, too, since Denton continued, "I’m not even going to tell you how much our ad revenues were up in February.  Because that rate of growth is in part a statistical fluke.  For the year to March, it looks like we could be as much as a fifth up over last winter."

And all of this becomes even more significant once you take into account the fact that February is usually a slow month.

Denton didn’t go so far as to sound the all-clear, of course; doing so while the Dow’s at a 12-year low would be irresponsible.  But we may have reached a point at which even one of our industry’s biggest pessimists is starting to feel secure.

Hat tip goes to Tameka Kee.

"We’re delighted to add this vibrant site to our portfolio of information products," said Jim Guest, President and CEO of Consumers Union. "The Consumerist community is passionate about fair retail practices, truth in advertising, product safety, and other topics that Consumer Reports has championed for more than 70 years. The site is a perfect fit for advancing our mission of creating a fair, safe, and just marketplace."

Here’s the plan according to an announcement on the site:

What changes?

– You keep your same commenter login and name.

The change in ownership comes right along with the new year, after the site’s three-year run with Gawker. On the surface, it may seem like an attempt to make up for a lack of ground in the online world on the part of Consumer Reports, but they insist that despite current publishing industry challenges, Consumer Reports and ConsumerReports.org have experienced robust growth across print products as well as online during the last seven years. Consumerist gets over 10 million page views a day.

For us, Wonkette lost its appeal once Ana Marie Cox left and Wonkette became a Wonk.

That and two other blogs, urban travel site Gridskipper and music blog Idolator, will have new homes. Valleywag editor Owen Wilson republished the formal announcement email from Denton about the cuts:

Why these three sites? To be blunt: they each had their editorial successes; but someone else will have better luck selling the advertising than we did.

Everybody says that the internet is special; that advertising is still moving away from print and TV; and Gawker sites are still growing in traffic by about 90% a year, way faster than the web as a whole. But it would be naive to think that we can merely power through an advertising recession. We need to concentrate our energies, and the time of Chris Batty’s sales group, on the sites with the greatest potential for audience and advertising.

In dropping three of his fifteen blogs, Denton said in his email Gawker Media only gave up about 3 percent of its total audience. If the ad bubble really does burst, as Denton has been expecting for a couple of years, Gawker Media will be a little ahead of the retrenching everyone else will have to do online.