There’s about a month left until Nick Denton and Rex Sorgatz can settle their bet about whether the Gawker redesign hurt traffic. If the wager were based on August’s traffic, Denton would win, as Gawker Media’s page views hit 515 million.
Denton tweeted Tuesday night, “Gawker.com page views hit all-time high: 19.1m in last seven days.” It isn’t only page views that have rebounded from the February dip after the new design; unique visitors are up, Denton told me by email. Just after the redesign, the site had 1.3 million uniques per week; that number has increased 54 percent to 2 million uniques.
The network as a whole has also recovered, Denton says. Post-redesign, the network had 7.8 million uniques a week. In the last seven days, the sites had 9.8 million unique visitors. And that was before Gawker published its latest story on Fox host Bill O’Reilly and his wife.
By comScore’s numbers, the network is up in page views year-to-year as well. However, the network and all sites but io9.com are down in unique visitors year-to-year.
U.S. Unique Visitors (000) | July 2010 | July 2011 |
Gawker Media | 18,937 | 16,634 |
GIZMODO.COM | 6,530 | 5,322 |
GAWKER.COM | 5,020 | 4,529 |
LIFEHACKER.COM | 5,241 | 4,420 |
KOTAKU.COM | 3,114 | 2,552 |
IO9.COM | 2,170 | 2,279 |
JEZEBEL.COM | 2,377 | 2,092 |
DEADSPIN.COM | 1,794 | 1,781 |
JALOPNIK.COM | 1,999 | 1,456 |
This same trend — page views up, uniques down — was apparent in April, though the sites have continued to make design tweaks since then, most significantly in July. || Earlier: Gawker sites see page views begin to return as Jezebel’s April traffic bests last year’s
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