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A Gawker Data Postmortem

6 Tricks That Got This Website Millions of Clicks

Michael Tauberg
The Shadow
11 min readJan 31, 2022

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It’s hard to remember, but there was a time when Gawker was one of the most popular properties on the web. This trailblazing blog captured the attention of millions, spawned a collection of hit sites, and forever changed the tone of journalism. Instead of a deferential posture towards public figures, Gawker was full of antagonistic condescension, creating as many fans as it did enemies. As the Gawker site has recently rebooted, I thought it would be fun to do a data analysis on it.

This was easy enough since the folks at Gawker kindly put all their old articles online. These pages include the usual info of headlines, authors, dates and story content. However, they also include something few other site have — pageview stats. Say what you will, but Gawker was transparent. Each story clearly showed how many views it had next to a nice fire emoji. Eg.

By scraping every gawker article ever published, I was able to glean insights into what made it so popular. I’ve shared this info in a complete database here. But if you’re busy, here are some things I learned from all this data¹.

Gawker Traffic was Impressive

The first thing to notice is that Gawker’s traffic was truly impressive. Over its 15 year run…

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The Shadow
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Michael Tauberg
Michael Tauberg

Written by Michael Tauberg

Engineer in San Francisco. Interested in words, networks, and human abstractions. Opinions expressed are solely my own.

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