Gawker's Numbers Tanking | Hacker News Reader

Gawker's Numbers Tanking

therawfeed.com

19 pointstgrass23 comments

I can explain part of it: the hash based URLs are completely broken in Canada (and presumably elsewhere). Any link I follow (e.g. gawker.com/#12345) redirects to ca.gawker.com. The hashes aren't preserved on redirect, and I'm not interested enough in the content to go searching.

Same for me in the UK, can't remember the last time I clicked a Gawker link and ended up reading the content.

Same in the UK. You have to hit the url twice to get it to work. Cannot believe they didn't test it.

I've had the same problem with them lately. Extremely frustrating when you really want to read something and then can't find it.

I wonder if hashbang was only rolled out in the US. Seems effectively so, if not technically.

It's interesting - I'm down in Sao Paulo, Brazil right now, and I spent the better part of 15 minutes trying to read a story there. Every time I tried to enter the URL it kicked me into a .br page and I was unable to find the original story.

I eventually just gave up.

Is this any surprise considering their new design? The only way I can read any Gawker site is via an RSS feed and even then I can't stand to read past that and actually visit the site.

I know a number of people who fell back on using the mobile version but it was so much hassle they just found alternative sources. I used to hit Kotaku and io9 multiple times per day but the new design meant I spent more time trying to find stories than actually reading. Was a pity to lose sources that were usually pretty solid.

I stopped visiting Lifehacker not just because of the redesign, but also because the noise began to drown out the signal. They post a ridiculous amount a day, and I just wasn't interested in most of it. I'd rather follow something with fewer posts and much better quality than be overwhelmed by their firehose.

Of course, that's just for browsing by RSS. I suppose the "tons o content" model is geared towards people that visit occasionally over the course of a day. But with the hideous design, why would you want to?

Also they F-ed up the RSS feeds. Take a look at this one for the top stories on Deadspin: http://deadspin.com/tag/top/index.xml

Barely anything since Feb. Before then there were 4-5 items per day.

They've F-ed them up worse than that, a few months ago I got a full feed of Fleshbot in the place of my Gizmodo feed. Fortunately I closed my laptop in time, or it could have been a much more interesting meeting at work (No doubt followed by one with HR)

With their AJAXy interface, I wonder if perhaps page views are not being counted properly. Put another way, I'd like to see a chart of ad impression numbers.

I'm sure the redesign cost them, but I'm surprised it's such a big hit.

I love how designers and product visionaries absolutely refuse to test major redesigns. Hey guys, why not fork 1% of the traffic to your major redesign and see how it performs? Millions of dollars on the line that could have been saved with about $5k worth of developer time.

Lifehacker's numbers are conspicuously absent. I've read through other sources that their pageviews took at a bit of a hit but remained relatively steady. I guess that piece of information didn't fit nicely with the story.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/17/gawker-redesign/

EDIT: link

http://lifehacker.com/stats-month shows lifehacker pageview declining pretty significantly this year and a dramatic decline in "new visitors." (Somewhat fittingly, the buttons on the stats pages don't work quite right for me)

I said at the time that the redesign would hurt Gawker, especially when they responded to the backlash with "well, everybody complains when Facebook changes" - not realizing the power of Facebook's social stickiness. But that's quite shocking even to me. Their own stats show visitors cut to a third of what they were in January.

I guess UI matters, huh?

I stand corrected. Not sure what TC were referring to, their graph ranges from mid-January to mid-February and the trend should have been noticeable by then.

Deleted comment

This is much more complicated than staking their reputation and traffic on to one line of code. Hashbang puts content retrieval into the client rather than a browser being a simple receiver (with js functionality applied, natch). This was a major architectural change for them and this whole fiasco points to a lack of foresight and, possibly, experience.

I'm guessing that sometime in the last year, someone at Gawker Consolidated Industries took the lead on doing this thing that Facebook and Twitter are doing and hey, if all the cool kids are doing it, why not us? Well, for one thing Gawker doesn't have the zillions of dollars to pay for the talent that FB and Twit have to ensure that the project is a success. Furthermore, given the money, whether Gawk would be able to detect and hire the talent required to make this change a success is left as an exercise for the reader. Even if they tried to cherry-pick technical talent from the companies hashbanging successfully, how many of us would jump from FB/Tw/Goog to...Gawker? I smell hubris.

I can't say the same thing wouldn't have happened if I personally tried to implement it, but I'm not Nick Denton or whoever the nepotistic minion is being protected here. The funny thing is that TC was ALL OVER Twitter when they were having problems, calling people out by name for decidedly smaller problems.

Lastly, I don't know if this would ever be possible in the business world, but it might be smart to (try to) put some kind of clawback or breakup provision in the kinds of agreements sites like Gawk have with its subsites where ownership reverts if the parent fails to thrive and traffic/usage falls below pre-agreement levels. I wouldn't be surprised if Gina Trapani wishes for something like that nowadays.

I discovered last week that the redesign isn't so bad if you go to "Blog view". I don't know when that got introduced between the day I stopped reading gawker sites due to the redesign and last week, but it's reasonably inoffensive.

Still, every gawker site has a less-annoying competitor, and I'm guessing that most of the folks who used to read the gawker version are now reading another version with the same damn stories. Once people have been driven into the arms of a competitor it's tricky to get 'em back.

One of the commenters mentioned the geo-redirects. I'm assuming this doesn't affect the individual domain's traffic count (since the source measures entire domain?). Now what if they are charging substantially higher rates to the advertisers though, since they are keeping the time shown of an ad up.

I don't really mind the redesign since I usually get linked to individual articles instead of browsing around their sites, but that grey line at the "fold" really bugs me. Anyone else get that?

This is just fine with me. I still won't read Gawker sites because of what they did with the iPhone 4.

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