What's Happened To Jalopnik?

Jack Baruth
by Jack Baruth

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.

Jack Baruth
Jack Baruth

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  • Gregt Gregt on Mar 09, 2011

    Jack - We disabled sitemeter on all Gawker Media sites as we found it to not track accurately with ajax content loading. -Greg, Gawker product lead

  • Jerseydevil Jerseydevil on Mar 09, 2011

    really bad design. cant move around, it a colossal failure. i've been there a few times lately, it sucks. what a shame, its a good site.

    • Jerseydevil Jerseydevil on Mar 09, 2011

      having said that, i went to the site, there is a switch on it that provides a sequential blog, like it used to be. i am happy now.

  • Ronin It's one thing to stay tried and true to loyal past customers; you'll ensure a stream of revenue from your installed base- maybe every several years or so.It's another to attract net-new customers, who are dazzled by so many other attractive offerings that have more cargo capacity than that high-floored 4-Runner bed, and are not so scrunched in scrunchy front seats.Like with the FJ Cruiser: don't bother to update it, thereby saving money while explaining customers like it that way, all the way into oblivion. Not recognizing some customers like to actually have right rear visibility in their SUVs.
  • MaintenanceCosts It's not a Benz or a Jag / it's a 5-0 with a rag /And I don't wanna brag / but I could never be stag
  • 3-On-The-Tree Son has a 2016 Mustang GT 5.0 and I have a 2009 C6 Corvette LS3 6spd. And on paper they are pretty close.
  • 3-On-The-Tree Same as the Land Cruiser, emissions. I have a 1985 FJ60 Land Cruiser and it’s a beast off-roading.
  • CanadaCraig I would like for this anniversary special to be a bare-bones Plain-Jane model offered in Dynasty Green and Vintage Burgundy.
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