The redesign (like many redesigns) was met with plenty of user backlash, and many expected it to drop the sites’ pageviews dramatically, leading to some questioning the business sense of the move. In early March, traffic was down by nearly 25%. Now, however, founder Nick Denton has tweeted the following graph, indicating that pageviews are up:

That bit about @fimoculous paying up is in reference to a bet Denton made with Rex Sorgatz. The wager is reported to be somewhere around a grand.

In related news, Gawker Media has reportedly hired Andrew Gorenstein, Senior Executive Director of Digital Sales at Condé Nast as its new chief advertising officer.

“This is no print dinosaur,” Denton is quoted as saying in an internal Gawker email, alluding to the fact that Gorenstein spent his entire time at Condé Nast on the digital side of things, where Denton admits to being jealous of the publisher’s ad sales.

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. 

Now stories about brands like about Gawker, Yahoo, Twitter, McDonalds, and Walgreens are dominating the headlines. Last weekend, in case you haven’t heard Gawker was hacked, and passwords were taken. One of the biggest problems with this is that these passwords are often used at other sites around the web, and depending on which sites the perpetrators get access to with these passwords, the ramifications could potentially be disastrous for those whose passwords were stolen. 

For example, if abusers were able to get into email accounts, there is no telling what kind of personal information they would gain access to – passwords to other sites, credit card info, etc. 

According to the BBC, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Yahoo have all asked users to change their passwords to be safe. If you had a Gakwer account, you may want to consider changing all of your passwords, at least at any critical sites (banks, e-commerce sites, social networks, email accounts, etc.). 

Arik Hesseldahl at NewEnterprise shares the following statement from Yahoo: "As part of our ongoing security measures we issued a password reset to some users. Yahoo! does this periodically to ensure the security of users." Hesseldahl speculates that this was directly related to the Gawker attack, however, as he had a Gawker account.  

He also reports that Blizzard Entertainment, which makes the enormously popular World of Warcraft, sent an email to users, which said: "We’ve recently been informed that several Gawker Media websites have been compromised…To help minimize the effects of this compromise and help keep your Battle.net account safe and secure, we’ve reset your account password."

McDonald’s was recently hit. Hackers reportedly broke into a database containing email addresses and birthday dates for consumers who signed up for the company’s promotions.

Mark Darvill of security firm AEP Networks tells WebProNews, "High profile hacks such as the breach of the McDonalds database highlight the need for greater data protection. This breach follows a long strike of attacks on websites in light of the release of the WikiLeaks cables and companies across the world will be wondering what website will be next on the hackers’ list."

"In this instance, McDonalds has lost nuggets of customer data rather than reams of sensitive personal information," adds Darvill. "The sad fact is, hackers will always have their eye on how they can steal sensitive personal data. Personal data is valuable as it aids identity theft and can prove a valuable source of income for hackers. This breach highlights the need for organisations to double check what security measures third parties have in place to protect their sensitive data.  Data protection is no longer just about protecting data when it is on your premise."

Walgreens also sent an email to users recently saying:

We recently became aware of unauthorized access to an email list of customers who receive special offers and newsletters from us. As a result, it is possible you may have received some spam email messages asking you to go to another site and enter personal data. We are sorry this has taken place and for any inconvenience to you.

We want to assure you that the only information that was obtained was your email address. Your prescription information, account and any other personally identifiable information were not at risk because such data is not contained in the email system, and no access was gained to Walgreens consumer data systems…

Incidents like these are bound to make consumer uneasy about online shopping at the worst possible time of the year. Still, online holiday spending in the U.S. alone reached nearly $22 billion during the first 40 days of the season according to comScore.Update: now that spending has reportedly hit $23 billion. 

The FBI is reportedly investigating the Gawker attack. 

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.

Defamer’s writers are moving on, and the column is being taken over by Gawker’s Richard Lawson and a yet to be hired reporter, while being supervised by managing editor Gabriel Snyder. Denton announced the changes yesterday afternoon, just in time to get it switched over before the Oscars (of which there is plenty of coverage of on Defamer).

"Gawker now draws more than 3m visitors a month — four times the audience it had in 2007," writes Denton on his blog. "More than three-quarters of Gawker’s readership is from outside New York. The inclusion of Defamer’s Hollywood gossip — following an expansion of political coverage last year and the incorporation of Valleywag — reflects Gawker’s evolution into a national gossip site."

Denton told the Wall Street Journal that he is hoping to get a nice boost to Gawker’s traffic by rolling Defamer into the site, just as he did with Valleywag last year. If nothing else, the timing was a good choice for the move – the biggest Hollywood gossip day of the year.

Speaking of the Oscars, YouTube and Google Book Search are both highlighting Academy Award content. You can see parodies and books that some of the films were adapted from.

"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.

Gawker announced they are shifting their business model from quanity to quality:

Where there was a shortage of attitude and commentary, there’s now a surfeit. And what’s in heavy demand, and short supply, is linkworthy material, by which I mean a secret memo, a spy photo, a chart, a well-argued rant, a list, an exclusive piece of news, a well-packaged find.

With them determining quality based on the ability to garner links and pageviews, do you think that is going to improve content quality, or just cause more mud slinging and noise? The easy way to get more page views is controversy, as pointed out by Scott Karp and Scoble.

2008 will probably be a nasty year for online content quality, as the true flaws of PageRank and the selfish nature of bloggers with new found power shine brighter than ever, feeding off one another. Blogs that once acted as hubs spotting good ideas and sending visitors to them will now take your best ideas, reformat them, add a bit of original content, drop the attribution, and get the pageviews they need to get paid. Where they once linked at your new content look for them to link back to their recent greatest hits from 2 days ago. Every post builds off the last. Every blogger for themself.

Google has Knol. Wikipedia has Wikia search. Yahoo has answers. Mahalo has how tos. Topical channels that highlighted content will get greedier with links. Virtually every clean traffic source is trying to become the end destination too.

People will eventually get sick of controversy and traffic hoarding the same way we became banner blind. Anyone just getting started out might be able to make some moves into the market with controversial content, but for those who are already established the key to future growth will be going back over your old ideas, refining them, making them more accessible, and producing them in better formats. 10 pieces of anchor content will pull a site further along than 1,000 me too posts. And linking out will still help too, assuming you pay your content writers based on something other than pageviews.

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The focus of the debate right now is Gawker, where Nick Denton has apparently started paying his bloggers based in part on how many views their posts get. This one has been around for awhile, but now it’s official thanks to a memo on (Gawker-owned) Valleywag.

It’s also something that has come up before, including about a year ago when ZDNet said that it had started paying its writers on the same basis, i.e. a salary combined with a bonus based on traffic (I wrote a post about it at the time). And there have been other occasions as well, including when Business 2.0 magazine — which was then being run by Owen Thomas, now better known as the senior editor of Valleywag — started compensating writers based on their blog traffic.

In his memo, Nick says something that is very true about the difference between blogs and traditional media. While digital media gives editors or publishers the ability to track and compensate based on traffic:

“At newspapers, a reporter’s reputation depends on the opinion of their editors, which can be fickle. Some people get on because they play the office politics well. Or simply because they’re more aggressive in lobbying for more prominent jobs, or pay increases.”

The key question, of course, is whether rewarding bloggers for traffic is a good thing or a bad thing. One argument is that “incentivizing” bloggers to boost their traffic encourages them to make their posts more sensational, and will lead to them writing about nothing but Britney Spears or whatever they think people will be looking for, instead of deep and thought-provoking posts about serious issues. This is similar to the argument about people writing just because they want to show up on Techmeme.

The opposite argument is that it’s good to give writers a stake in the success of their blogs, something that encourages them to take an interest in their community. Will that encourage them to “sell out?” Perhaps. But maybe it will also encourage them to respond to comments, link to others who are discussing the same issues, and so on. Even former Gawker editor Choire Sicha thinks it’s not such a bad idea.

The bottom line is that — as Scott Karp notes at Publishing 2.0 — rewarding writers based on traffic is both good and bad. In some cases it will make that writer more engaged, and in others it will simply encourage them to post on whatever cheap train wreck is going on around them, hoping for a quick traffic boost. But I think in the long run it is likely to make them more intimately involved in their blogs, and more interested in developing a relationship with their readers, and that’s a good thing.

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Blogs can be used to practice journalism, they can be used to practice drive-by celebrity character assassination, they can be used as a gigantic time-sink so as to keep people from doing real work (and occasionally, as in the case of The Smoking Gun, they can accomplish all three at once). They can be about serious subjects, with well thought-out opinions, or they can be the blitherings of a know-nothing with a typewriter.

Asking whether blogs can be journalism is like asking whether pencils can be used for journalism, or whether people who type can be journalists. Sure, they can, but that doesn’t mean they always are. You could make the same statement and replace the word “blog” with the word “newspaper.” Do all newspapers practice the rigorous, fact-based, dual-sourced journalism people think of when they use the word? Hardly.

What Nick Denton is looking for seems to be the prototype of a new kind of journalist, practicing something close to what Jeff Jarvis calls “networked” journalism (which Jay Rosen is also working on). An excerpt from the job posting Nick put up for a Gawker reporter:

“At its most elevated, the new Gawker hire may experiment with a new form of reporting, unique to online, in which ideas are floated, appeals made to the readers, and the story assembled over the course of several items, from speculation, and tips from users.”

Nick’s brand of Fleet Street-style journalism may not be to everyone’s taste, but there’s no question that it’s journalism. The fact is that until recently, only a small group of people had the tools required to engage in journalism. Now, the tools are virtually free, not to mention instantaneous. The combination of those two things has up-ended the journalism business — such as it was — and continues to do so.

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