How Much Damage Was Done?

The above chart is fun to look at.  All the commenters leave and site traffic drops to 10% of what it was.  It’s tempting to greet this with cheers and celebrations.  However, as my personal hero once observed, “Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed.”  There’s another explanation which, honestly, makes a bit more sense.

The redesign broke a lot of things.  It broke the comments, readability, good will, and it appears to have broken the ability of Sitemeter to accurately monitor site traffic.  According to Remy Stern in a rather lengthy catfight with Gabriel Snyder, “Sitemeter hasn’t been working since the redesign took effect.”  According to Remy, “the ajax is making it difficult for the counters to track traffic properly.”  This results in the dramatic dropoffs.  Of course, that doesn’t stop the spat from being fun too read (if you like reading inside baseball).

Still, my money is on the codemonkeys breaking the trackers rather than 90% of pageviews being gone after the redesign.

Update: The more accurate numbers for the Gawker Media Empire are said to be found on Quantcast.

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