Gawker Media Page View Numbers do not add up
Information about how much bloggers are paid is always interesting, as it in general is tightly held just like any other payroll information on the face of the planet. You do not really want to know that the 20-year-old kid is earning 90K while you who have been at the company for untold decades are still in the 80K range after multiple annual cost of living adjustments.
Blogonomics has done some great work in working out how Gawker Media pays its bloggers, and it is well worth reading, but what stands out like a sore thumb is that the numbers provided by Blogonomics of the Gawker web site do not add up. If anything their march 2008 numbers that, they are counting as page views do not match up with what site meter (their own site meter stats) are off by some 6 million page views rounded up.
Reported on the Gawker media statistics page they have this handy list to show off who has what statistics for how many page views a blogger gets.
At the bottom of the page, they nicely add them up for everyone.
The problem comes in with their site meter statistics that shows 11.5 million page views against the 5.3 million page views that the writers are being credited with.
Before you think that we hacked gawker media to find out what their statistics are, all sites in the gawker media system have free and open access to their site meter statistics at the bottom of almost every page. The little icon on the bottom left of their web site and nearly every page has free access to site meter. Anyone can see these numbers, if you click on the handy icon at the bottom left of the page.
While we have no affiliation with Gawker media, the idea of being paid by page views is fairly standard, although they are usually unique page views to keep writers from jacking their own statistics. The problem comes in when two reporting systems come in with different numbers, and there is a large gap between them. Writers are necessarily going to be annoyed if they are being underpaid by 40% of their actual page views.
This incongruity in statistics works for January as well with a reported 16+ million page views, but gawker is only paying their writers for 9.2 million of them. While it is normal for more people to hit a landing page and just read the headlines without actually going in to read the article, it is not usually near 40% of all traffic, usually people come in for a specific article that they googled or the back linking that happens all over the internet. Individual articles are linked, and followed until the person hits a dead end or gets bored with it.
There should be some serious questions about the reported page views on the gawker media site where they cover how many page views their writers have gotten, against the site meter scores that show a completely different picture.
keywords: gawker, media, numbers, statistics, not, adding, up, blogger, payroll, money, pay, payment, dollars
Wow, if this is true that they are underpaying their writers then they should honestly be ashamed, Gawker hosts some of the best writers out there, period.
There’s a very simple explanation. The numbers for each writer show the pageviews on *individual* articles which they penned. They do *not* include views of the front page. Hope that clarifies.
Nick, Thanks for the note back, I do appreciate it. The front page view count of 11 million against the near 6 million individual articles that is in its own right an interesting number. Gives me ideas.
[…] we reported that the pay per view numbers just did not add up at Gawker Media, now reports from Blogonomics shows that in reality people who […]