Gawker Media to lay off 14 percent of editorial staff

Posted by Caroline McCarthy
The financial crisis strikes again: Successful New York-based blog network Gawker Media will be laying off 19 of its 133 editorial staffers, according to an internal e-mail from publisher Nick Denton. The company will be additionally suspending its bonus payments to writers and editors, but will be increasing their base pay and making some strategic hires at the company's most successful blogs.

"With the savings, we are increasing base pay and hiring 10 new people on the most commercially successful Gawker sites," Denton wrote in the e-mail. "But I know that's scant consolation for the colleagues we're losing and for those of you who have been enjoying the bonus windfalls from breakout stories."

The bonus system at Gawker, a network of snarky and witty gossip- and culture-focused blogs that Denton founded in 2002, has provoked controversy and banter throughout the new-media world: the company pays most writers at a base rate but then adds a bonus for every thousand page views a single post pulls in. The bonuses will continue to the end of 2008, but have been suspended for the first quarter of 2009 at the least.

Equally controversial has been some of the blogs' own content, which countless pundits have criticized for being puerile, mean, and occasionally invasive. But in New York, where Gawker Media has been arguably the most successful new-media start-up story of the past decade, the layoffs can only be described as unfortunate and sad: its writers and business staff are valued members of the blogging community and Gawker Media's downtown offices have become a popular hangout and party space...

Good News For Big CDN Users, Bad News For CDNs: Prices Dropping

Good News For Big CDN Users, Bad News For CDNs: Prices Dropping

Digital video companies and media conglomerates: Good news if you're shopping for a little (or a lot) of content delivery services.

Pricing dropped significantly during Q3 for some of the middle-of-the-road (250 terabytes transferred/month) and larger (1000 TB/mo.) video delivery customers during the quarter, according to survey results published by industry analyst Dan Rayburn. Some highlights:

• The biggest drop in pricing came for relatively smaller volume customers -- 250 TB/mo. -- where CDNs apparently courted them with cheap rates. Average pricing ranged from 20 cents to 35 cents per gigabyte delivered in Q3, down from the range of 40 cents to 55 cents per gigabyte delivered in Q2.
  
• The next-biggest drop came for very high-volume customers -- 1000 TB/mo. -- where rates ranged between 2.5 cents to 10 cents per gigabyte delivered in Q3, mostly down from the range of 4 cents to 9 cents per gigabyte delivered in Q2.
• Service pricing for mid-to-high-level customers, in the 500-750 TB/mo. range, stayed about the same.
  

Also noted: Limelight Networks (LLNW) was the "most aggressive with regards to price" while industry leader (by market share) Akamai Technologies (AKAM) was "coming in at almost double" to rival quotes. But what we don't know: Who won which deals at which prices -- and what this all means for Akamai or Limelight's Q3 results.

Look Who's On Top for 'Economics of Advertising'

Ed: After 8 months and 1,000 posts extracted from 10,000 articles, guess who is number one on the new Blog Search from Google?

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New Economics of Advertising - Simplify the technologies behind the new economics of buying and selling advertising. The New Economics of Advertising - Simplify the technologies for buying and selling advertising. Clickety Clack: Online Advertising Economics - My experience in online advertising and venture capital

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TechCrunch50 and Demo 72

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Google Launches Its Own Memetracker

Google has just launched a new homepage for its blog search that bears a strong resemblance to Techmeme, Memeorandum and their “memetracker” counterparts. The site displays a listing of the top stories from across a variety of topics including business, politics, technology, and entertainment.

Memetrackers identify emerging trends on the web, especially across blogs. They are often the best way to learn about breaking news stories, as they can automatically monitor hundreds (or more) news sources at once. Major news outlets and user-submitted content sites like Digg often trail memetrackers by days...