Not much to Gawk at

Gawker or is that Nawker?

So, how’s that redesign coming, Denton? Between the rotating WHITE SCREEN OF DEATH and “Post Save Failed” it’s no wonder I’ve taken my commenting juice elsewhere and the stats look like this:

Gawker Stats

Denton claims that Sitemeter isn’t accurate: all I can say is that I’ve used them continuously for five years and that my own sitemeter readings for two blogs over that same period of time are completely in line with expectations and agree as well with my WordPress.com stats.

UPDATE: Here’s the direct link to Gawker sitemeter stats which Denton doesn’t want you to look at, versus the Quantcast stats, which he does. And on Twitter, Matt Cherette comes to the defence of the Dark Lord.

When your whole raison d’etre is to get the infotainment out before anyone else does (“Tomorrow’s news”) and foster a pageview-pumping dialogue in your comments section, this is about as complete a failure as can be imagined. God knows, I’ve bashed Gawker enough in the past, but it’s because Gawker matters to me. It’s rapidly ceasing to do that. Before, I would have put my debunking of the fake Anonymous chat transcripts in the comments section at Gawker, then damned myself for not blogging it first. Now, even if I wanted to post it on Gawker first, I couldn’t.

Yet another example of why meeting a launch date with a flawed product is a bad idea. Who needs hackers when you’re your own worst enemy? When this is still happening, one month after the launch, you need to go back to the drawing board AND the blog view.

Related articles

• pC2011 Video: Felix Salmon Interviews Nick Denton, Founder, Gawker Media (paidcontent.org)
• Pick one: Gawker takes a hit/Gawker is coming back (thepomoblog.com)
• What’s wrong with Gawker’s redesign (thenextweb.com)