Gawker eases away from page views and to unique

The powerhouse that is Gawker Media is believed to be moving away from raw page views as a key measurement and towards unique visitors.

Website theAWL.com has what seems to be a leaked memo in which Nick Denton, Gawker big cheese, explains the shift.

“… some pageviews are worth more than others” and an item that gets picked up and draws in new visitors is worth more than “a catnip slideshow that our existing readers can’t help but click upon”.

Spot on. He’s right of course. It’s never been a challenge to design a site to generate lots of pageviews. In the battle for ABCE ratings here in the UK we even see mainstream newspapers put slideshows in non-Ajax, page-reloading, popup galleries.

What Denton wants is content that breaks on Twitter or even on TV. This means the excellent teams at Io9, Gizmodo, Kotaku and others will have to work harder for their pay.

The challenge of breaking news means being a quick second is less likely to produce the necessary results. A quick second keeps loyal readers happy as their RSS feeds and daily surfing brings them the news they need to know, the news that they later see people tweeting about or hear from their friends. A quick second is less likely to win that Twitter momentum than a genuine scoop.

We could see some dramatic shifts in blogging from the teams. We could well see a wider range of content appear on the blogs – as the bloggers cast their nets wider in order to lure in those uniques (and if they don’t come back for the next two months; good, they wouldn’t have counted anyway but at least this way they can be unique again). It is entirely possible to see Unique Visitor numbers rise while overall page impressions fall.

The shift in focus may well be good news for online PR and social media agencies too. Gawker’s bloggers may well be more interested in a wider range of news and certainly interested in a coordinated outreach program that might benefit their articles with traffic from fresh and original sources.