Nick Denton Stands Firm

Nick Denton knows most people in media view his remake of his stable of Gawker Media sites three months ago as an unmitigated disaster. He just thinks they’re wrong.

The stubborn founder of Gawker Media says that after some early hiccups with the company’s much-discussed (and much-derided) redesign, traffic has stabilized, while advertising has taken off. And despite ongoing criticism and a clear rejection by some users, Denton does not plan to take Gawker back to its popular, blog-oriented publishing layout, which posted stories in reverse chronological order.

“If we were going to backtrack, it would have been a couple of months ago when we hit bottom,” said Denton.

Indeed, Denton shared Quantcast data showing that Gawker Media’s page views have returned to about the level  they were last year after tumbling in late February and early March. The traffic story is a bit less sunny,according to comScore data. Gawker Media’s unique-user base abruptly plummetted from a high of 19.8 million in January to 14.7 million in March. Compared to the same month last year, the March figure was down about 750,000 users. Individually, sites like Gawker.com and Gizmodo.com lost about 2.3 to 2.4 million unique users from January to March of this year. However, compared to a year ago the declines are less severe, with Jalopnik (down 700,000 uniques) and Kotaku down one million) taking the biggest hits. Gawker.com actually showed growth. As for page views, while Gawker properties absorbed an initial blow, by March they had returned to near average levels, backing up Denton’s argument. Data from Hitwise reveals similar stabilization.

The perception remains that Denton made a big mistake in drastically overmaking his stable of properties. As of last week when one typed the words Gawker redesign into Google, the first four suggested phrases that popped up were “traffic,” “horrible,” “failure” and “fail.”

Denton said that the recent flurry of huge news stories, from the royal wedding to Osama bin Laden’s death, have helped boost traffic. That points to one of the main thrusts behind the new redesign: keeping big stories at the top of Gawker’s sites. Under the old model, a huge story about Lindsay Lohan, for example, might get pushed off the Gawker homepage in a matter of hours by some lesser blog posts, given that site always listed the last-published story first. Denton cited a scoop by Kotaku last Friday on the latest version of the popular Call of Duty game franchise, which received top billing much of the day.

”In the old days, a sensational story like Kotaku’s would have fallen off the page in a few hours,” said Denton. “Now we can splash it properly.”