We knew there was something funny with Gawker Media

Earlier 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 work for Gawker are not getting what they should be getting paid.

Jordan Golson can’t be happy: Nick Denton has cut the amount of money he gets per thousand pageviews to $6.50 from $9.75. That’s a 33% pay cut, on a per-pageview basis. What about on an absolute basis? Source: Blogonomics

The question we have is Valleywag headed to the dead pool?

Knowing that Valleywag is a Gawker Media site, and you can go check out their statistics personally right here (remember the link at the bottom of the page to their stats at Sitemeter) there is probably a bigger problem here. The stats as shown below just are not that good for an A-List blog.

What is interesting is the amount of traffic that is hitting the home page, but then that is normal, what is weird is the number of deep links that do not happen. When checking on this story, deep linking to articles either via search engine, or via some linking mechanisms, larger sites with multiple bloggers live via deep links.

Imagine if you had click monkeys all day working on your site doing nothing than hitting the front page. What is really killer is that the average time on site is 14 seconds, that is barely enough time to register a page view or a page ad. Great for statistics, bad for everything else.

Taking a 33% pay cut is generally something that you would see in a recession, and if Valleywag is in that much trouble that they have to paycut, we may be looking at another blognation kind of blowout. Since these are all gossip rag kind of folks, it will be very interesting to see what ends up happening when these folks bail and burn every bridge they ever had. There is usually one in a crowd that will do this kind of thing.

Makes you wonder, but we think that Valleywag is in more trouble than they want to let on, and the numbers game, pay reductions, and statistics from their websites pretty much show that maybe Gawker Media is in more trouble than they are willing to admit.

keywords: nick denton, valleywag, gawker media, paycut, recession, money, blognation, deadpool