Gawker’s blind drive for page views.
I don’t know if Gawker is trying to be acquired or if they are just trying to drive up the page views (and ad revnue) on their sites. I read Deadspin, Valleywag, Lifehacker, and Gizmodo regularly and enjoy what they publish on the sites. However, over the past month they have been redesigning all of their sites in what looks to be a desperate attempt to draw page views. They are now requiring you to click on a more button on the majority of the stories.
Here are some sample stats from what I eyeballed today (I could be off by a few posts) and how many of the articles (real ones, not one line blog links) you need to click a "more" button to finish reading the post.
- Deadspin 8/11
- Valleywag 10/10 (one of which you had to view three pages to get the entire story)
- Gizmodo 34/42
- Lifehacker 2/15
Just eyeballing that, it’s about 80% of the stories that you need to view a second page on, meaning that when I went to Deadspin in the past I could view the front page and get all the info I wanted. Now I need to view close to 20 pages to read all the information. On Valleywag, thirty pages rather than one. However, Lifehacker seems to keep the "more" button in check. Why would that be? Because it’s a site that is about being proficient on the web and in your daily life. It’s not very proficient to have to view an exponentially larger number of pages than you have to now is it.
I wrote Will at Deadspin when they first changed the format and he said he didn’t like it and was trying to use the more button less. This changed for a few days, but I guess when Nick Denton finished up at Valleywag last week he decided to make drive the Deadspin pages through the roof. This is also very annoying when I am trying to browse on my EDGE enabled Blackberry, no fun at all.
Nick Denton, please stop driving your page views through the roof for your profit and at your loyal readers expenses. See, I like you stuff and I’m sending page views your way, I just don’t like how you’re going about it now.
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Comments
Unfortunately, it does make it a lot harder, not easier for casual browsers (or speed limited browsers). Now we can’t read the whole story. Now only hard-core readers can see the story, and us casual browsers are left with a summary to catch our attention but no real meat.
And is it just me or did Nick just compare his cutting edge content delivery method with a dying old-media model? Really? Headlines? Isn’t that what’s wrong with the media these days, headlines driving the business, an sensationalism has now ruled the media? Is this where Gawker wants to go?
Hey, Otis, this doesn’t actually have such a big impact on pageviews. Maybe 10%. Main reason is this: our bigger sites have 20-plus items a day. It’s too much for people to read. So we have to make front pages that are more scannable, to give casual readers more control about what they read at length. Think of any news site, like the BBC; with lots of headlines and summaries on the front page, but few full stories. As our sites get bigger, they naturally evolve towards something more like that.