Gawker’s Stagnant

Felix Salmon writes:

Gawker’s unique visitors have been stagnant for two years: they essentially reached their present level at the end of 2005. Gawker’s pageviews continued to grow through 2006, as (a) Nick Denton increased the number of blog entries with a "jump" which required navigating away from the home page; and (b) the comments system became very sophisticated and capable of drawing people back to the same post dozens of times in succession.

But then, at the end of 2006, Denton found himself unable to grow the pageviews-to-unique-visitors ratio any further, and both pageviews and uniques were basically unchanged through 2007.

At the moment, Gawker is going through the biggest change in its history, and no one knows how it’s going to turn out. But I’m quite sure that Denton, having maximized the pageviews-to-uniques ratio, has realized that the only way of increasing pageviews at this point is to increase the number of unique visitors that the site receives.

But here’s the problem: the very posts which will help bring in new unique visitors (Denton wants Gawker to be "a national media gossip and pop culture site, which is based in new york, but can attract a national audience") also risk being the posts which alienate Gawker’s core commenter audience.