Gawker's Traffic Numbers Are Worse Than Anyone Anticipated
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I simply don't understand the point of the changes they made.
Edit: from one of the comments on the article (I'm even more confused about their changes now):
"Another thing that may be contributing is that after the redesign they, Gawker, put some national redirect for Canada that actually breaks the links and just dumps you on the home page. This has become so frustrating that I don't actually go to gawker sites anymore and used to log into lifehacker and i09 nearly daily."
The fact that they haven't figured this out by now tells me there's something very wrong in their software camp.
When I click any link from google however, I'm automatically redirected to the JP top page, so I have to take the www out of the url and replace it with us.
it's such a PITA that I've pretty much stopped using Gawker sites all together.
It's really annoying and entirely unnecessary. A blog is not a web app and doesn't need to be built like one.
What a disaster, but will they have the balls to go back?
In theory if one had a web server running locally, one could add gizmodo.com to /etc/hosts and map it to loopback, then configure said web server to catch gizmodo.com and rewrite the URL to redirect to m.gizmodo.com instead...
Like this perhaps, using Apache's mod_rewrite:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} kotaku\.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} _escaped_fragment_=(.*)
RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://m.kotaku.com/%1 [L,R=permanant]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} kotaku\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://m.kotaku.com/$1 [L,R=permanant]Im sure FF versions exist, and it uses ca.site, so it has the old design.
Really? Gawker has not had web analytics for the last two months, after a major redesign? That is hard to believe.
Gawker has also had a broken 'Back' button in Firefox, where you can click on an article and it requires 3 Back clicks to get you somewhere you didn't mean to go.
Gawker sites are now also serving out giant pages -- the images are not saved for web viewing (generally huge compared to their pixel area and could be much smaller with non-lossy compression). I checked out Firebug one day after the redesign, and saw almost 2MB of JS, in separate files and not minified.
I would like to hear about the process for this. Unfortunate, as I used to enjoy Deadspin as a go-to break time site.
That also struck me as highly doubtful. Many people here work on big web apps; the idea that something as critical as analytics could be broken for two months is ludicrous. My manager would be having some sort of embolism if it was down for two days. After 2 weeks, I'd probably be fired. After another two weeks he'd probably be fired!
Analytics are the bread and butter of large web sites. If they go down, you basically stop doing business. It's inconceivable. Denton has the motivation to lie, so it's pretty clear that's what this claim is.
Its a news site, literally the entire purpose of the site is to show text and (some)pictures, why try to make it fancy?
The guidelines we worked under at my previous job basically said "if a user action changes a substantial portion of the page, it qualifies as an impression". It seemed pretty fair to me at the time.
Advertisers (especially with rich media) get ridiculous interaction metrics from their creative, they know what people are doing with their ads. Lots of them are happy if an ad sticks on a page for half a minute and is then replaced.
Not only that, but I seem to get a 2px gray line that fills the width of the page and scrolls with the content. Ever since the redesign, every time I stumble upon one of their pages I click the back button.
But if that was not enough, they traded a system where each site had its own look and feel for one where every site looks exactly the same (except for a small logo in the header).
It's interesting because the content is the same, only the packaging and user experience has changed. It seems that reader-loyalty on news sites like the Gawker sites, Techcrunch etc, and community sites like Digg, is actually very low. Probably much lower than the sites themselves believe.
I dropped Gizmodo before the redesign, partly due to the stolen iPhone incident, but mostly due to every other article being Apple related, with the ensuing mindless and juvenile MS / Apple bashing in the comments.
Lifehacker I dropped after the redesign, as it just didn't work very well any longer.
Lucky for me, and everyone else except the blog networks, is that other content more suited for my tastes, is only a URL away. I have no commitment, no subscription or any other reason to ever look back.
Thus I think the point to take home, is that you should listen to your users / readers, no matter how obnoxious or "trollish" they might chose to express themselves. It's easy to just dismiss and ignore a point of view, if it's expressed with profanity. But below the profanity, there is usually a reason or argument, which you must find and listen to. At least if it's a recurring theme (i.e. "the new design sucks").
If you don't listen, you risk loosing your "loyal" users, probably much faster than you ever thought possible.
Seriously, if you are going to make major changes to your website, do what many other sites have done. First you put up a discussion with features and looks that you want, then wait and see the reaction. If it's positive move to the next phase, create a beta page and randomly divert a viewer to the beta site. Then have an option to input opinion so you can see reactions.
Shocking your viewers with change is a horrible way to go about updating your website.
What sites have done this?
It's generally not newsworthy because it generally doesn't lead to totally disruptive fiascos.
Maybe I'm in the minority but personally I still find it a bit stunning that a site like this would pay for stolen property and then display it online. Even if it doesn't turn out to be considered criminal activity, it's ethically reprehensible.
That was probably the only reason I ever visited Kotaku, and now I know better than to even try clicking.
(By October, Denton promises to pay $10 for every 1 million pageviews below 510 million, and Sorgatz has to pay $10 for every 1 million above 510 million.)
Also, a minor correction with this article:
Gawker backtracked rather quickly on the redesign, adding a button to switch the site back to a traditional blog format, which allows readers to scroll through post headlines and excerpts in reverse-chronological order. But by then it may have been too late.
AFAIK, this button has been available since the beginning of the redesign.
"Nick Denton wrote in to argue that the site's internal tracker has been broken for two months. "Those numbers are total pageviews from all sources for all sites," he said, referencing Quantcast data. "We were doing about 100m a week. At the low-point, we dipped to 75m. We're now back at 93m."
Denton is definitely a spin artist but I don't see a huge incentive for him to flat out lie given his advertisers can instantly see their campaign display metrics etc and pay on a CPM basis . . .
Go here: http://www.quantcast.com/ click the gawker url click the 'gawker media network' parent organization chose 'impressions' from the pulldown click 'week'
voila, the exact numbers he's quoted.
As much as the general perceived reaction to the gawker redesign has been screechingly negative, the actual traffic impact was modest. Denton claims this was a deliberate one step back two steps forward kind of thing and traffic will return in a couple quarters.
I really liked the old design, it wasn't broken and sure as hell didn't need fixing like this.
What a bunch of retards.
That reminds me, I'd been meaning to unfollow Lifehacker on Twitter.
Bull.
Someone at Gawker decided This Was The Way To Do It, ignored everyone else, and in the process flew their business into the ground.
I doubt they'll ever go back. The execs would probably rather lay off 10 writers than admit they were wrong. Pisses me off to no end.
I checked it again just now on my iPad to see if they had fixed the problem. This time my iPad was redirected to the "mobile" version of the site - which is just a long list of headlines without any pictues.