Two great articles from Portfolio.com regarding Gawker Media one of Silicon Valleys most notorious gossip and trash talking blogs/websites.
Let’s be generous and say that Denton spent $1 million on editorial advances/salaries in January. At $7.50 per thousand pageviews, that means he’s paying for roughly half of his quarter of a billion pageviews: the other half (such as pageviews of the blogs’ home pages, or pageviews from bloggers who no longer work for Gawker Media) Denton essentially gets for free. Or, to put it another way, his editorial budget is closer to $3.75 per thousand pageviews than it is to $7.50.
There’s a meme going around saying that Gawker Media’s most successful bloggers are pulling down six-figure incomes, which I’m sure is true. Doing the math: at $7.50 per thousand pageviews, you need to get just over a million pageviews per month - excluding visits to your blog’s home page - in order to make that kind of money. Let’s say that half a site’s total pageviews are attributed to individual bloggers, and that there are six bloggers per site.
More on this article from Blogonomics: Gawker’s Payroll
In the month of February, Gawker’s most-read blogger was Richard Lawson, with 1,208,704 pageviews: he earned $9,065 for the month. Ryan Tate, in the number-two spot with 970,219 pageviews, earned $7,277. The least-read blogger was Nick Douglas, who got 267,570 pageviews. My guess is that his base salary is more than $2,007 per month, which means that he can’t be feeling very secure right now - especially since he’s bottom of the league table in March as well.
Total payroll for the month of February was $33,294, plus some extra for people whose base pay is more than their earn-out: call it $40,000 in total. Gawker received a total of 14,088,429 pageviews in February, which means that Denton is paying his writers about $2.84 per thousand pageviews that he receives.
More on this article from Blogonomics: Gawker’s Payroll, Redux
Interesting Profile by the Guardian (UK) on Gawker Media owner Nick Denton.
Gawker Media public statistics for those curious enough in this infamous media-gossip website
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