What's Happened To Jalopnik?

What if Gawker redesigned their sites and people stopped coming? It’s a question being asked with more and more seriousness as the nice people at Sitemeter continue to display some genuinely terrifying statistics regarding pageviews for Jalopnik, io9, and the rest of the cutesy-name sites in the Denton Media Mafia, er, Family, er, Domestic Partnership. One recent chart suggests that Jalopnik readership has dropped by a staggering seventy-five percent since what’s been called “the worst site changes in human history, I mean, this makes that one crazy bridge somewhere that, like, wiggled and broke look like the Pyramid of Khufu, solidity-wise, kinda, uh, is my latte ready yet?”

Read on for the big picture and an alternative explanation for the crazy stats…

Well, that looks bad… but on CrassTalk, it’s being suggested that it’s Sitemeter, not Gawker, at fault. In this exchange between a variety of amazingly hipster-ish, emotionally brittle, prematurely balding, unbelievably annoying New York wannabe-fems whose collective asses could probably have been easily kicked by either my twelve-year-old self or a particularly aggrieved kitten, one Gawker d00d says

Apparently the ajax is making it difficult for the counters to track traffic properly.

It’s THE AJAX, STUPID! Who knows? He could have a point, although a quick call to an AJAX developer whom I know didn’t reinforce my confidence in that idea. More likely: it’s a combination of site-tracker difficulty and Gawker’s magnificently indifferent, suck-it-peasants attitude regarding reader complaints in the post-redesign era. Yes, Apple frequently gets away with alienating their entire user base in the service of some Insanely Great Idea, but that approach only works if the ideas are Insanely Great. Coming up with a Murilee Martin knockoff series called “Found Off The Street” and posting photographs of Steve McQueen’s genitalia moves the insanity meters but leaves the greatness one completely still.

It’s not like we don’t have some gracious sympathy here for our friends in the blogger biz, particularly after I blitzed Jalop’s Wes Siler by thirteen seconds a lap at Monticello two years ago. TTAC’s redesign wasn’t exactly a smashing success, but let’s be honest: we can’t afford to fix it. Gawker’s boss is reportedly worth $290 million, so we suspect he can afford to “fix the ajax”. Perhaps another few months of disappearing readers will convince him to write the check.

Disclaimer: the author is an occasional contributor to Jalopnik, although he suspects that won’t happen again after he clicks “Publish” on this story.