Nick Denton: Pay-for-page-views was too successful

Jordan Golson — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 10:00:02 -0800

When asked what he would have done differently with Valleywag after it was announced that the site was closing, Gawker Media head-honcho Denton said he "probably wouldn't have paid out those big bonuses to [writers] at the start of the year!"

Ah, could this mean the famed Gawker "pay-for-page-views" plan was a failure?

Nah. "Worked too well!" Denton told me. "The traffic increased by way more than we expected and it worked out for [the writers]!"

As for the future of Valleywag.com, both Denton and Valleywag managing editor-for-another-month Owen Thomas (both of them my bosses when I worked at Valleywag) tried to correct my story about Valleywag the other day. Denton said that "Valleywag is not closing" and Owen told me that his writing will still appear on Valleywag.com, though the content will be primarily for Gawker.com. "A strange sort of shuttering, that," he mused.

Denton explained the logic behind the combined operation:

The combination of Valleywag into Gawker reflects three main things. 1. The broad appeal of Valley stories: people like Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin are of nationwide interest. 2. The increasingly national reach of Gawker: three-quarters of the readers are outside of New York. 3. The importance of scale for advertisers: one domain combining Valleywag and Gawker will have 4m uniques.

As clarified by Paul Boutin in "What just happened at Valleywag? The FAQ", Valleywag's archived posts will be shifted to valleywag.gawker.com, where ads purchased on Gawker.com will magically appear. Apparently it's easier to sell ads to vodka companies and movie studios than it is to get HP and Intel to cough up the dough.

Owen Thomas will continue to write (what he does best and enjoys most, I think) on Gawker, 6-12 posts per day -- but his posts will appear on Valleywag.com, so the site isn't going to disappear into the ether. Permalinks and comment will appear on Gawker, so as to benefit from that site's advertising and an attempt to combine Valleywag and Gawker's existing audience. It's a convoluted explanation, but I stand by my assertion that the site is, if not closing outright, ceasing to exist as we know it.

I wrote for Gawker Media and Valleywag from October 2007 to April 2008 (when I too, was fired). Semantics over "closing" aside, the valley has lost one of it's finest publications and I sincerely hope Owen can continue to keep the valley's hypocritical asshats on their toes.

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Nick Denton: Pay-for-page-views was too successful