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Topic: Miscellaneous items
Date/Time: 3/2/2009 2:01:01 PM
Title: February "wasn't dreadful" for Gawker Media
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
 
From: Nick Denton
Subject: February rah-rah
To: [Gawker Media staff]
Date: Monday, March 2, 2009, 1:36 PM

February's usually a miserable month. It's cold -- at least here in New York right now. It's short -- even shorter this year than last. Sites like Gizmodo and Jalopnik typically come off the highs of the big trade shows. And this time last year we had -- financially -- our worst month ever. Oh, yeah, and we're in the scary bit of the worst economic slide in decades.

So here's a chink of light. February 2009 wasn't nearly as dreadful as it could have been. A lot of sites struck traffic records -- including io9, Gawker, Deadspin, Jalopnik and Jezebel. In total, we drew 297m pageviews -- some 34% over last February's level and 50% up if you account for the sites we spun off in the meantime. Comments -- so much improved in the last year -- grew even more rapidly. Now that Defamer has been consolidated under Gawker, we don't have a single weak site.

And I'm not even going to tell you how much our ad revenues were up in February. Because that rate of growth is in part a statistical fluke. For the year to March, it looks like we could be as much as a fifth up over last winter.

That's partly a reflection of the resilience of our editorial and audience; partly to do with the fact that the pageviews are now concentrated on fewer and larger sites; and it's testament too to the popularity of the new big ad units and the sales team's success in selling them.

As all those commercials on TV keep reminding us, nobody knows what the future will bring. Online ad spending could take another lurch down; or we could finally fall victim to the downturn that's pulling down so many other media companies; we'll continue to cap costs; and there's plenty more we can be doing to boost our audience and squeeze out more advertising dollars; we can't afford to be complacent.

But to feel relieved? Yeah, at least today, that's excusable.

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