Gawker Media Traffic Jumps with Page View Incentives

Blogger Simon Owens emailed me about a post he had on Gawker Media. Early in the year, the publisher of such popular sites as Gawker, Gizmodo, Valleywag, and Consumerist told its bloggers that they would receive a base amount of money and then bonuses based on the number of page views they got. He analyzed the change in page views since the announcement. The changes were anywhere from 23 percent to 83 percent. In thinking about the changes, a few things became apparent:

• It's impossible to say what caused the growth - general expansion of blog readers, Gawker Media marketing programs, or the work of the bloggers themselves.
• There's no way of knowing how much of the growth will stick with the blogs, or if it will churn, requiring ever more effort to attract people to maintain the numbers.
• From these figures, there is no way to translate between page views and unique audience members.
• People may come by periodically to read the sites, or they may be landing there after a search - and that would put a different interpretation on where exactly the efforts of the bloggers had been most effective. Do readers drop by because of the voice of the writers, are the writers doing their work in such a way that it comes up on popular search results, or are they breaking stories that drive interest?

Whatever the case, it looks like the Gawker sites would be worth some visits and analysis if you're writing a blog and want to get tips on how to help attract more audience.