Vallewag’s Owen Thomas relayed the news from Gawker that his best paid-per-page-view staffers were on the list of newly unemployed. Among a 60 percent reduction in Valleywag’s staff were associate editors Nicholas Carlson and Jackson West, and Silicon Valley deviant behavior reporter Melissa Gira Grant, queen of page views and vessel of working-girl related news.

Instead of citing a decline in Valley-area prostitution, Gawker cited expected declines in advertising revenue, especially in the consumer electronic sectors, Valleywag’s biggest clients. Sure enough, Apple stock has been hammered in anticipation of an impending, if uncertain in strength, recession. Fewer people are going to have the cash to luxuriate their subprime home offices with Apple products.

The anticipation of financial difficulty, not actual difficulty, seems to be driving cost-reduction moves among many ventures. New York Times’ Brad Stone and Claire Cain Miller don’t want you to panic or anything, but “a pall of anxiety seems to be spreading over the land.”

Cue spooky music and soliloquy by Vincent Price.

Noticeably, financial services and automakers are pulling back advertising, and at the top of every web startup’s mind is the trimming of the ol’ budget. Looks like those salad days are at least put on hold for a while, at least until the credit crunch subsides. 
 

We have to imagine one-time solo Wagger Nick Douglas, now a special correspondent for Valleywag, must have done a loud facepalm when Melissa Gira Grant signed on to Nick Denton’s Silicon Valley blog and started dishing out R-rated pictures and sex talk.

To think, Douglas’ posts about Eric Schmidt’s personal life were controversial once. Probably still are, but Grant’s relatively anonymous ladies discussed in her post probably aren’t multi-billionaires who could be Denton to painful inconvenience.

Grant’s approach has repeatedly achieved the blogging Holy Grail – page views. “I’m a sex worker, a mistress-for-hire, a whore,” Grant said by way of her introductory post on Valleywag. Now, when you see a young lady wearing little more than a smile on a Valleywag post, it’s a given Grant is on the byline.

As long as she’s racking up thousands of page views, probably to the dismay of writers (ok, maybe not, see comment below) like Paul Boutin, who agreed with our Jason Lee Miller that Valleywag might be thought of as something of a porno site now.

Lighten up, boys. With as many people tuning in to Grant, it’s obvious the Valley isn’t missing the next great startup, not when there’s a woman who will talk frankly, honestly, and above all, dirty to them. The real shocker (ha ha) will be when sites like InfoWorld and Information Week start hiring Grant-clones for their sites.

In a t-shirt, no pants.

And a blonde who’s definitely not Shannon Tweed (I’d heard they had an "open" relationship, never thought I’d see it in action.) And that just makes the whole thing extra ewwwwy.

Like watching somebody’s dad get it on (creepily casually, chewing gum, as though being serviced) with the babysitter. Ewwy, again.

After the shock wore off (this involves a rather elaborate process of eye-drops, self-flagellation a la Opus Dei, ritualistic interpretive dance, a chicken sacrifice, and a promise to never, ever do that again), I remembered that Valleywag is a Silicon Valley gossip site.

So, if Bill Gates or Eric Schmidt (double-dawg ewwwy) popped out a tech-billionaire romp vid taken from inside one of the Google Jets or at a hotel in Davos, it might make an inkling of journalistic/blogolistic sense why their Full Monties would be displayed. The safe route even then might be just to link out and give it the old NSFW warning, along with a you-probably-don’t-want-to-see-this warning.

But Gene Simmons and some Australian spokesmodel (NSFW) who both look like it’s more about business than pleasure? Scratch that last part, doesn’t matter how they looked, and I’ll need to repeat the purging process mentioned earlier.

Valleywag’s sister site Gawker, where you expect celebrity smut news to be, didn’t even go quite that far. There are very selective screenshots taken from the vid, which are still yucky, but might pass the safe-harbor broadcast test.

It wasn’t even the writer you’d expect. It was Owen Thomas, not Melissa Gira Grant, Valleywag’s resident Valley sex reporter and reputed "page-view champ" at the site.

Oh. Maybe that’s it. Nick Denton did change the way his writers were paid: per page-view. If that’s the case and Valleywag’s writers are desperate for some extra cash in the upcoming pay-cycle, then we might expect to see more porn pop up at Valleywag.

They probably should be working on that age-verification thing, then, you think?  

To bring in that payday, Digg has enlisted the boutique investment bank Allen & Company to assist.

Citing a reliable source, VentureBeat noted the $300 million price tag that has been rumored for months is still in place.

Valleywag picked up on the rumors a month ago, saying, "Digg’s contentious audience, too, might not take to the site’s new owners. That’s the biggest obstacle, I suspect, to any deal happening."

One would think Microsoft would rate 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th through 25th on the list of new owners the Digg audience may not like. But with Microsoft providing advertising on Digg, Steve Ballmer may be the most likely person to write a $300 million check, if only to keep it out of Google’s hands.

That is, if Digg has performed well for Microsoft’s advertisers. If not, they could get in the game to bid the price up for someone else, ideally Google, and trick them into paying a premium on what could be a poor return.

If Digg has picked up in value by shifting to less tech and more mainstream content, as Allen Stern suggested, Digg could be a lucrative social media buy.

follow me on Twitter

I wrote about Gawker recently, after the site’s top writers left — including Choire Sicha and Emily Gould. Both said they were tired of the incessant snarking at Gawker, which likes to take shots at the rich and/or powerful (and in some cases whoever happens to wander into the crosshairs). And even Denton himself has said that he wants Gawker to break more news, rather than just sniping from the sidelines.

Something similar happened at Valleywag.com. Although the site was popular, it wasn’t a crucial read. Then Denton got rid of young Nick Douglas and took the reins himself as editor, until he lucked out and hired former Business 2.0 writer Owen Thomas. The new team have plenty of snark to throw around, but they also get scoops, and that’s the real secret (although in some cases they turn out to be less than, well… true).

Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 says Nick is one of those trying to create a different form of journalism. But the big question is the one posed by a commenter on the Valleywag post: Will Nick pay himself based on page views, as he recently started doing for his writers? According to several reports, that’s another reason that Sicha and Gould left.

Comments

Today, Valleywag has news that Google is testing the display of videos and products in the sidebar…

(image credit Valleywag.com)

Now, where have we seen this before, I wonder?

(via)

Comments

Tag:

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!

Comments

As you see the monthly uniques for the big mainstream media sites listed, you may ask yourself about the company in red, Gawker Media. While you may be unfamiliar with Gawker within the context of being an independent blogging company, I’m willing to bet you have heard or read some of blogs it produces, including GizModo, ValleyWag, and a laundry list of others.

What is especially interesting about these findings is just how well Gawker is measuring up to these mainstream media sites. As the Alley Insider pointed out: “Gawker Media’s 14 titles are already drawing more than 70% of Washington Post’s traffic.” – yet another demonstration of the rising influence of blogs and the pressure blogs are placing on mainstream media.

Comments

Tag:

Valleywag leads the pack, as always, wondering what the company means when it says he was fired “for violation of company policies”. They also suggest that Microsoft fired him while he was traveling to his sister’s funeral, in order to further embarrass him. Most of the speculation is in the direction of him being fired for cheating, or rather having an affair with an employee of his.

Valleywag talks about another firing at the beginning of the year, that of Martin Taylor, Steve Ballmer’s right hand man. Apparently the rumor mill has been spinning on that one, with company insiders saying Taylor was given the boot for charging the company for hotel rooms he charged the company for, rooms he used for weekend getaways as part of an affair with a coworker.

Seems to be becoming a pattern, or perhaps not. People are always having office romances, and some people are always cheating on their wives (just read InsideGoogle). Microsoft is just standing up and being willing to fire these people, no matter how important they are to the company. You’ve got to respect that, applying company policies to everyone no matter their pay grade, though having to hire a fourth new CIO in four years must be getting tiring.

Comments

Mary Jo Foley posted a compact statement from Microsoft regarding Scott’s firing: “We can confirm that Stuart Scott was terminated after an investigation for violation of company policies , and have no further information to share.”

Given the dramatically quick nature of Scott’s dismissal, certain speculation has been raised. Valleywag cited a tipster’s claim that Scott and a female VP reporting to him both took emergency family leave at the same time, suggesting an affair was taking place.

Valleywag also recalled the departure of Martin Taylor, a Microsoft executive who was out of the company a day after the debut of Windows Live Messenger, which he had a role in promoting.

Owen Wilson at Valleywag picked up on a tip about Taylor, which claimed he not only enjoyed an affair with a co-worker, but charged his weekend hotel trysts back to the company.

Yet lengthy delays in getting the Vista operating system to market, and Microsoft’s need to acquiesce to OEM demands that they be allowed to continue offering Windows XP to customers, hasn’t resulted in anyone being fired in the lofty peaks of the corporate apparatus.