I can explain part of it: the hash based URLs are completely broken in Canada (and presumably elsewhere). Any link I follow (e.g. gawker.com/#12345) redirects to ca.gawker.com. The hashes aren't preserved on redirect, and I'm not interested enough in the content to go searching.

It's interesting - I'm down in Sao Paulo, Brazil right now, and I spent the better part of 15 minutes trying to read a story there. Every time I tried to enter the URL it kicked me into a .br page and I was unable to find the original story.

I eventually just gave up.

Is this any surprise considering their new design? The only way I can read any Gawker site is via an RSS feed and even then I can't stand to read past that and actually visit the site.

I stopped visiting Lifehacker not just because of the redesign, but also because the noise began to drown out the signal. They post a ridiculous amount a day, and I just wasn't interested in most of it. I'd rather follow something with fewer posts and much better quality than be overwhelmed by their firehose.

Of course, that's just for browsing by RSS. I suppose the "tons o content" model is geared towards people that visit occasionally over the course of a day. But with the hideous design, why would you want to?

Also they F-ed up the RSS feeds. Take a look at this one for the top stories on Deadspin: http://deadspin.com/tag/top/index.xml

Barely anything since Feb. Before then there were 4-5 items per day.

With their AJAXy interface, I wonder if perhaps page views are not being counted properly. Put another way, I'd like to see a chart of ad impression numbers.

I'm sure the redesign cost them, but I'm surprised it's such a big hit.

I love how designers and product visionaries absolutely refuse to test major redesigns. Hey guys, why not fork 1% of the traffic to your major redesign and see how it performs? Millions of dollars on the line that could have been saved with about $5k worth of developer time.

Lifehacker's numbers are conspicuously absent. I've read through other sources that their pageviews took at a bit of a hit but remained relatively steady. I guess that piece of information didn't fit nicely with the story.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/17/gawker-redesign/

EDIT: link

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I discovered last week that the redesign isn't so bad if you go to "Blog view". I don't know when that got introduced between the day I stopped reading gawker sites due to the redesign and last week, but it's reasonably inoffensive.

Still, every gawker site has a less-annoying competitor, and I'm guessing that most of the folks who used to read the gawker version are now reading another version with the same damn stories. Once people have been driven into the arms of a competitor it's tricky to get 'em back.

One of the commenters mentioned the geo-redirects. I'm assuming this doesn't affect the individual domain's traffic count (since the source measures entire domain?). Now what if they are charging substantially higher rates to the advertisers though, since they are keeping the time shown of an ad up.

I don't really mind the redesign since I usually get linked to individual articles instead of browsing around their sites, but that grey line at the "fold" really bugs me. Anyone else get that?

This is just fine with me. I still won't read Gawker sites because of what they did with the iPhone 4.