Although a carefree summer month, June brought healthy traffic for Gawker Media — 239 million views across all properties.
Gizmodo's coverage of the Steve Jobs keynote on June 9 and a record-breaking streak for Lifehacker helped propel the network to this near quarter billion number.
June's tally is 100 million more views than the network saw one year ago and a significant step up from just one month ago.
Gizmodo's prominence in technology news continues to skyrocket! comScore released figures today reporting that Gawker Media (powered strongly by Gizmodo) welcomed the 5th largest share of all iPhone related search activity in April.
We're in the Top 5 with tech empires Apple and Google and have actually beaten out other notable tech properties CNET, Yahoo!, and AT&T (the official iPhone carrier).
Americans conducted 7 million searches for the Apple iPhone in April and 5.1% of that activity directed visitors to Gawker Media pages like Gizmodo's extensive coverage of the new iPhone 3G. Google and Apple's shares of iPhone search activity were 9% and 18% respectively.
Interestingly, comScore measured the market well before the Apple WWDC conference and confirmation of the iPhone 3G hit later in June. Gizmodo's killer liveblog (attracting 14 million pageviews on June 9 alone) has since provided some of the best iPhone news available to searchers on the web.
Vanity Fair's "Blogopticon" is a cheeky, visual response to the question: "Who's worth reading on the Internet?" The diagram arrays the web's most influential blogs by tone and content and includes five of our titles:
Jezebel
Valleywag
Consumerist
Gawker
Defamer
From Vanity Fair: View the Blogopticon and Read the Article.
Stuart Varney of FOX Business Channel can't get enough of our automotive property's monicker: Jalopnik. His mild-mannered British exclamations bookend Jalopnik editor/expert Matt Hardigree's analysis of the luxury car market downturn:
So, yep, Varney's a smart one. "Jalopnik" emerged from a bit of arcane wordplay and possibly a few ice cold brews several years ago..!
We're a little late with blogging our pretty graph this month thanks to some [insert technical jargon here], but nevertheless here it is!
Gawker Media sites saw 226 million pageviews in May 2008. That's a slight gain over last month and another step toward resuming normal trending after January's unprecedented spike. Year-over-year growth continues to be impressive: our properties received 80% more impressions in May 2008 than in May 2007.
Of course we're not just keeping tabs on pages delivered but on audience growth as well...
Three key metrics for Gawker Media, May 2008:
Pageviews: 226 million
Unique Visitors (aggregate): 32.9 million
Unique Visitors (de-duplicated): 27.2 million
Sources: Internal traffic measurement and Quantcast
Jezebel has, in its heady first year of life, ripped figurative glossy covers off women's mags, exposed dirty deceptions in beauty and fashion, condemned superfluous grooming and subservient social conventions, and forcefully remodeled our culture's understanding of the modern female's dilemmas and achievements. Whew!
But the site's readership — at over 1 million monthly unique visitors — isn't the only group to take note of the new feminism. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and FOX News recently featured Jezebel for its prohibition against celebrity bashing. Big media has called this a ban against "bodysnarking," but it's just a slice of the broader, smarter conversation on femininity that's evolving from Jezebel and its vocal readership. Check out coverage of Jezebel and its editorial direction from the big newsmakers:
FOX News guest says Jezebel sets the example.
Jezebel.com is a very popular blog for women... They cover celebrity media, but they said "look, we're not going to tolerate our commenters making negative comments about women's bodies. That's a really positive step, and other media should take a cue from that.
Read the recap post on Jezebel >>
"The Rise of Bodysnarking" names the movement and Jezebel as one of its spearheads.
Jezebel... resolved to do something about weight. This wasn't a gimmick to kick-start dieting among its loyal band of female readers. This was a resolution aimed at changing the way young women talk about one another.... [Jezebel Editor, Anna Holmes] was blowing the whistle on bodysnarking, the snide, often witty, comments that have become a ubiquitous part of under-30 female conversation.
"Not On Our Blog You Won't" profiles Jezebel's unlikely editorial view and commenter community.
The Jezebel blog was founded last spring by Gawker Media as a smart, feisty antidote to traditional women's magazines (or "glossy insecurity factories," as Jezebel describes them).
Jezebel appeals to a young, urban demographic, with a roster of editors whose strong voices inspire loyal followings. Ms. Egan shares details of her intimate life that are not safe for work. Maureen Tkacik...gravitates toward politics and speaks out against what she calls the "idiocracy." Dodai Stewart...pokes fun at magazines and catalogs; in a feature called LOLVogue, she writes satirical captions for fashion spreads.
Jezebel's readers — they often call themselves "Jezzies" or "Jezebelles"— are permitted to post to the site after a first prospective comment is approved by a Gawker Media staffer, and must adhere to some basic rules: be witty and relevant, no whining and don't attack people.
So a few of us are down at the iMedia Agency Summit in Austin, TX this week... and as usual, we're documenting all the after-hours thrills 'n spills!
For snapshots of ad industry folk caught stirring up mayhem, get yourself over to the "Advertising Edition" of our popular Gawker Stalker celeb tracker. Be sure to tag people you know, add captions, and make comments.
It's all here: AdStalker
We opened the floodgates to user comments in 2006 and have never looked back. As a result, commenting volume, quality, interactivity, and complexity have since increased multiple-fold on our properties. Undoubtedly some of the most interesting conversations and deep-linking narratives now occur in the expressive sandbox below our editorial fold — the commenters' dominion! Here's a look at how this subset of vocal readers is burgeoning at Gawker Media.
POPULATION
Nearly 100,000 new commenters registered this past quarter. This new registration sum is 220% higher than in Q1 2007. Newsbreaking editorial and opinionated discourse continue to attract new members to our group. (It should be noted that commenter status isn't attained by just providing an email address to get login credentials. Becoming a Gawker commenter requires a "first comment audition," and keeping the login requires continued high quality commenting!)
VOLUME & FREQUENCY
So just how much volume does this kind of registration growth create? Well, this same time last year our commenters were posting 4,300 daily missives. In Q1 2008, our readers published an average of 480,000 comments per month across our sites, which is a daily average of nearly 16,000 individual opinions. That's 270% growth in volume over the past year. With the population growth at 220% percent and the volume growth at 270%, the average number of comments per user is significantly higher. Our commenters are now engaging in a more frequent and intricate pattern of discourse than they were last year.
INTERACTION
In addition to making comments, our readers follow and befriend other commenters and keep track of their activity with a personalized friend feed. The uptake on these interactive tools since their introduction in late 2007 is impressive. The below graph depicts the continued increase in daily friend "following" over the first quarter of 2008. Most recently, our membership has been "subscribing" to between 400 and 600 new commenters every weekday.
So the quick 'n dirty takeaways on these charts and figures? Gawker Media commenters are growing in number, output, and interactivity year after year. And while visitor metrics are the traditional proxies for reach, tracking growth in active member participation gives a fascinating new view into how our network is expanding its audience and influence.
April traffic, at 221 million pageviews, sustained March traffic numbers. The modest, horizontal growth is the hybrid result of some lost traffic to our three departed sites (Idolator, Gridskipper, Wonkette) and new, record-breaking growth by sites that continue on in our group (Kotaku, Deadspin, Fleshbot saw new highs this month). The net-zero difference is exactly the negligible effect we expected to see after carefully trimming our titles.
As a collective, the Gawker Media group is still settling back into its proper growth slope after January's massive spike upset (in a good way!) our usual monthly traffic movement.
News hit the wires today that we're letting go of three titles: Idolator, Wonkette, and Gridskipper. You can bet these brands will be missed, but the individual losses will have negligible effect on the network as a whole. VP of Sales Chris Batty advises, "The company is organizing around [its] best opportunities" for marketers and "this is unmistakably good news."
Below some key facts on the Gawker Media network as it continues on today and then, head on over to Gawker for a Letter from the Publisher, Nick Denton.
GAWKER MEDIA KEY FACTS
* A dozen sites, Gizmodo first launched in August 2002, most recent, io9, in January 2008
* Gawker, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, Jalopnik, Deadspin, Defamer, Jezebel, Valleywag, io9, Consumerist, Fleshbot
* A record 18 "Bloggie" nominations in 2008, way more than any other blog collective (one of those was for Idolator)
* Audience of 29.7m unique visitors a month for the whole network, up 82% at annualized rate
* Each individual site has at least 1m uniques or, in the case of io9, soon will
* Pageviews of 227m in March — 219m if you take out the three sites being spun out — up 89% on a year earlier (Sitemeter)
* For those who measure these things, Gawker is the web's leading independent blog group
