When Gawker launched an aggressive redesign back in early February, the tech blogs were waiting to see what would happen. How would readers respond? (The assumption was that the reaction would be negative -- readers tend to avoid change and reject it when it's forced on them -- but nobody knew just how negative.) Starting about one week later, writers flooded the Internet with posts about not just the reaction -- "Gawker really effed this up" -- but also the numbers. Quantcast found that Gawker's traffic was cut in half, TechCrunch reported; Gizmodo's numbers were almost as bad. Nick Denton, the network's overseer, stood by his design and insisted that the readers would return.
But they haven't. Now that the complaints have, for the most part, slowed to a trickle and the tech blogs have stopped looking into Gawker's traffic numbers, we decided to dig in a bit. What does the network's traffic look like now that two and a half months have passed? Turns out, according to Gawker's public statistics, things are much, much worse than was originally reported. Yes, the redesign cut traffic in half almost instantly, but instead of coming back, even more readers left the site behind.
Here, a graph we put together using the number of unique visitors to the homepages of five sites in the Gawker network -- Gawker, Gizmodo, Jezebel, io9 and Deadspin -- from November through today.
以下が Gawker ネットワークの 5つのサイト (Gawker、Gizmodo、Jezebel、io9、Deadspin) のホームページについて、11月から今日までのユニークユーザー数をまとめてグラフにしたものだ。
What accounts for the steep drop in numbers? While there hasn't been a major news event in April to help traffic spike, it's not as though we're comparing March numbers to those from a particularly great month. As you can see in the chart, the number of unique visitors across each site held roughly steady between November and January.
The last time I spoke to a member of Gawker's team, I was told that the site is built using Ajax (Javascript and XML) and, when users realize this and scroll through using keys (j/k) to move from one post to the next, Gawker's system doesn't register each of those posts as a new pageview.
最後に Gawker のチームメンバーと話したときに私は、サイトが Ajax (Javascript and XML) を用いて作られており、ある記事から次の記事へキーボード (j と k) で移動することができ、その場合 Gawker のシステムはそれを新しいページビューとしてカウントしない、ということを教えられた。
Gawker backtracked rather quickly on the redesign, adding a button to switch the site back to a traditional blog format, which allows readers to scroll through post headlines and excerpts in reverse-chronological order. But by then it may have been too late.
This post originally implied that the graph displays unique visitors to each of five Gawker Network sites. The chart shows Gawker's internal statistics for unique visitors to the homepage of each site represented.
Nick Denton wrote in to argue that the site's internal tracker has been broken for two months. "Those numbers are total pageviews from all sources for all sites," he said, referencing Quantcast data.
この記事には始めから、Gawker ネットワークの 5つのサイトのユニークユーザー数を示すグラフが掲載されている。このグラフは Gawker の内部統計による各サイトのホームページのユニークユーザー数を示している。
Nick Denton の記事によると、サイトの内部トラッカが 2ヶ月の間壊れていたとのことだ。Quantcast のデータによると、「すべてのサイトについて、この数字は全ページの総ページビューだ」と彼は述べている。