Things aren’t looking so good in Silicon Valley these days. As the US economy adjusts to recession, funding for ventures is down, stock prices are falling, and online tabloids have to let go even their decadent Valley prostitution reporters.
A simple formula pays off at the Valleywag corner of the Gawker Media empire: take a mostly male audience in a notoriously sexually frustrated profession, add a dirty-talking scribe, and watch the page views roll on in.
Valleywag's never been one to pull punches, especially if the punch puts at risk the more prudish element of the audience. But they've never, as far I as know, gone full-on NSFW at the site itself. Celebrity sex tapes are all the rage on the Internet, but do a search on Valleywag and only one result comes back—one for Gene Simmons.In a t-shirt, no pants.
According to the one-man investigative team known as Brian Stelter — formerly known as the guy behind the blog TVNewser, who beat the pants off most of the media reporters at the major dailies while he was still in school — the new editor of Gawker is none other than the founder of Gawker Media, the secretive and unpredictable Nick Denton himself. Stelter says he has it confirmed through several sources.
It’s always fun whenever someone discovers one of Google’s many experiments with their search interface. 99% of the time, the discovered tests never materialize as a major rollout for Google, but it’s still worth noting.
Valleywag yesterday begged its readers to click on a link to me so that it could beat Fake Steve Jobs for the title of “most clicky audience.”
So, I thought I’d post my referer log to show you who is sending the most hits. FSJ is still 7x more clicky. Too bad Nick Denton! :-)
Last week I read an interesting article by the Alley Insider that I’ve been dying to share - mainly because it included the following Nielsen chart that revealed an interesting comparison of sites.