About ten days ago, gossip blog Gawker and its sister sites Gizmodo, Lifehacker and others switched over to a drastic redesign which was met with plenty of jeers. People always complain about design changes, but this time it looks like several of Gawker’s sites actually took a major hit to traffic.
According to Quantcast, which directly measures the sites, Gawker’s U.S. daily unique visitors were cut in half from a high of 561,000 to 257,000 (see chart above). Gizmodo dropped from 746,000 to 420,000 in the U.S. Sitemeter shows an even more harrowing freefall for Gizmodo (see chart at right). Jezebel and Deadspin also took hits. Only Lifehacker seems to be holding steady. → Read More
In the modern media equivalent of a Greek myth, the Gawker empire was hit hard over the weekend when it was revealed that a hacker group had infiltrated its commenter database via a vulnerability in its source code, exposing the user names and encrypted passwords for over 1.3 million commenters.
To further drive the moral of this story home, the group, which goes by the name Gnosis, pulled a dictionary attack and unencrypted about 188K of the easiest ones like “password” or “qwerty” releasing the whole database and source code package in a torrent on Pirate Bay. → Read More
The iPhone 4 may be available to the general public, but the police investigation into the leaked device that Gizmodo purchased last spring is still going strong. Now there’s been a new development: the EFF reports that the San Mateo District Attorney has withdrawn the warrant it used to search Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s house last April, when it confiscated multiple computers, hard drives, and other electronics.
Update: The Wall Street Journal reports that Gawker has reached an agreement with investigators. Chen’s materials will be returned, and Gawker/Chen will be voluntarily handing over materials deemed “relevant to the case” by a court appointee. → Read More
We’ve had our fair share of outages around here, but we’re not nearly as big as the Gawker blogging empire is, so it’s worth noting that every site in the Gawker Media blog network is currently down and out.
From Gizmodo to Gawker.com, Kotaku, Jezebel and Lifehacker, every visitor to the sites operated by the new media company is being served a dry message that reads ‘Http/1.1 Service Unavailable’. (Update: back up) → Read More
For many years, tech fans have known that Steve Jobs will occasionally respond to messages directed to his well-publicized email address. Most of the time his responses consist of snappy one-liners, often containing a nugget of new information. But it’s rare to hear about a full-on debate, with Jobs offering some rationale behind Apple’s highly controversial decisions.
That’s exactly what happened last night, when Gawker writer Ryan Tate got irritated by an Apple ad describing the iPad as “a revolution” and shot off an email to Steve Jobs. Three hours later, at nearly 1AM, Jobs replied, and a passionate email debate ensued. The email exchange is mainly focused on Apple’s stranglehold on the iPhone OS platform, and its decision to force developers to build applications using Apple’s tools. → Read More
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a guy walks into a bar. No, a guy walks into a bar with an iPhone. No, a guy walks into a bar with a next-generation iPhone disguised as a current-generation iPhone. No, a guy walks into a bar with his next-generation iPhone disguised as a current-generation iPhone and leaves it there. Okay, we’ve never heard anything like this before.
Yes, it appears that the next hardware iteration of the iPhone (two common monikers are ‘iPhone 4G’ or the ‘iPhone HD’) has been outed. And while the apparent specs are sexy (higher rez screen, front-facing camera, bigger battery, etc), the story behind the leaked device seems even more interesting. → Read More
Owen Thomas, who has run the Silicon Valley gossip rag Valleywag for the past couple years, is leaving Gawker, the site’s parent company, we’ve learned. This move is a bad blow for the site which significantly cut its workforce a few months ago as it was rolled under the larger Gawker.com umbrella, and made into a column.
Thomas, who was previously an editor with Business 2.0, was brought in to run Valleywag in June 2007, replacing the head of Gawker Media, Nick Denton. Denton’s run as the editor of Valleywag came only after he fired Nick Douglas from the same job.
We hear Thomas is going to work for NBC on some kind of site which may or may not be centered around the Valley as well. [Update below, Denton has confirmed Owen's NBC gig.] → Read More
The Gawker-Yahoo content distribution deal, which allowed Yahoo to post Gawker content on its site, has been terminated. Our original post on the deal, announced in November 2005, is here. Gawker founder Nick Denton’s post on the termination is here. Nick suggests that the partnership just sort of petered out. But he also says that Nick Douglas’s regular attacks at Valleywag (a Gawker blog) on Lloyd Braun, head of Yahoo Media, didn’t help matters much. I imagine he might be right. → Read More
Gawker continues to drive its busines forward amidst rumors of an acquisition in the works with the New York Times. In addition to their recent deal to promote their content within Yahoo, Gawker today announced the launch of its newest blog, The Consumerist, a humorous slant on today’s consumptive world: “We here at Gawker Media love to spend our money, but we hate being treated like cattle while we do it. And so our big happy family is proud to announce the birth of our latest site: Consumerist, our answer to the utter fuckitude of modern capitalism.” Edited by Joel Johnson, who formerly wrote Gizmodo, The Consumerist is off to a strong start with posts such as “Gay Wallet Follies” and “Lenovo’s Free Thinkpad Battery Bait and Switch“. The Consumerist has a full, ad supported feed and a partial, no ads feed. → Read More
Gawker, a blog network similar to Weblogs, Inc., and Yahoo announced a syndication deal today that brings Gawker content to Yahoo News. Content from the largest Gawker blogs is already included – Wonkette, Gizmodo, Defamer, Lifehacker, and Gawker itself. More may be coming. The financial terms are undisclosed, but here’s what is now on Yahoo: Gawker brands and content are pushed throughout the news home page. Clicking on associated content pulls up a Yahoo page with the Gawker content (example). It does NOT redirect to Gawker. There is a single link to Gawker on the content page (clicking on the brand name). Otherwise, it’s an all-Yahoo experience. If I was doing the deal, I’d expect a revenue split in Yahoo’s favor on ad revenue generated from the page. Gawker gets that revenue, the branding, and some links directly to the blog. This is purely speculation, but my best guess. Is this an important deal? Yes, in that it shows Yahoo embracing blog content. The guy at Yahoo to get to know is clearly Scott Moore, named by Wired in their last print edition as VP Content Operations. Scott is hiring bloggers (such as Kevin Sites) and doing these kinds of deals with Gawker. These are smart deals for Yahoo – they generate page views where they can put lots of ads. If the deals are revenue share, then it’s a no lose proposition for Yahoo. But what Yahoo is noticeably not doing is acquiring Gawker, like AOL did with Weblogs, Inc. That means liquidity events for bloggers are limited – the GYMs (Google-Yahoo-Microsoft) are not yet in content buying moods. So perhaps the networks and very large blogs can cut deals to increase page views on content and generate revenue. Will this model work for the long or medium tail of blog content? My guess is no…the GYMs will want to control quality and that doesn’t scale with more than a small number of blogs. But certainly we’ll see more deals like this, particularly as long as the advertising market is strong and demand for inventory is outstripping supply. The portals need content, and this is a cheap way to get it. A lot of people are focusing on the fact that the deal is incorporating blog content directly into Yahoo news results. While I find this interesting, we’ve already seen Yahoo experiment with this with their blog search product. → Read More
