From the Gawker network, the ever updated source on information on new media has raised the alarm on the adoption of new media by traditional print publishers. This has become the norm of today’s economically challenged firms, go to the net but many questions have been raised about such a move since the net was born and began to spread its global reach. This would not only be wise, but would allow these traditional print media to maintain their diverse talent pool while they try to find a way of salvaging their other businesses in print. read on

The global economy is down and more people lose jobs, luckily the social web has blogging and other writing jobs that allows you to pass time and earn some cash in the process. Sadly however, blogs have also been hit hard with many networks losing so much money they have been forced to cut back on people.
Putting all the negative stuff aside, blogging remains to be a wide open space for those who seek to earn a living through one of the products of the social internet. The only problem, even this form of media isn’t safe from people who are motivated by greed, earning a buck or two out of your hard earned blog posts. From “Copy-Paste” artists to scammers, they use or hijack blogs for their own benefit leaving you out of the equation. Plagiarism as it is called in technical terms has become so bad that our own Splashpress Media has launched it’s own Copyright Service. With support from Plagiarism Today with regards to the specific legalities involved, it hopes to cater to the needs of customers who want to protect their hard-earned reputations.
read on

The Gawker Media network’s traffic hit a record high last October — 297 million pageviews for 12 sites, to be exact.

Quoting their official announcement:

The more important numbers to our marketers, however, are audience figures! Gawker, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Jezebel, et al now reach a total of

13 million US uniques
22 million global uniques

Congrats to Gawker Media for this milestone!

The latest announcement from the Gawker Media network reads:

With a subtle peak, July 2008 surpassed the previous all-time traffic record (January’s MacWorld spike) to set a brand new record of 254 million monthly pageviews! For benchmarking against other publishers, that’s twice what the Los Angeles Times’ site LATimes.com received in July (source: Editor & Publisher). With growth over May and June at just over 6% each month, Gawker Media has resumed an aggressive but normalized upward trend.

This confirms the results of Bloggasm’s Simon Owens’ earlier research, which showed that the network’s new pay rates are having a great effect on traffic.

Last month, we reported on the Gawker Media Network’s lowering of its writers’ pay rates. Their new system pays writers based on the number of page views their posts generate.

Well, it appears that this new system is working for the network, based on the results of a research conducted by Bloggasm’s Simon Owens.

According to Simon (no pun intended!):

So now that six months have passed, has the new system resulted in increased traffic? To find this out I analyzed Site Meter statistics for 11 Gawker Media blogs (I didn’t include Io9 since it only recently launched). Overall, traffic for all Gawker blogs combined saw a 40% increase in page views. Each individual blog experienced an average increase of 49%.

Read the full results for each Gawker blog here. Great job, Simon.

The Gawker Media Network has substantially cut its writers’ pay rates, according to Radar Online:

[For] the second and…third quarters of 2008, the company has reduced the rate of pay per pageview. Other Gawker Media sites, including Jezebel, also had their pageview rate cut.

At the beginning of the year, the pay rate per pageview on Gawker was $7.50, according to Portfolio’s Felix Salmon; it went to $6.50 for the next quarter and it is now $5. (Other sites vary, based on overall traffic and ad rate.)

The article’s writer, Choire Sicha goes on to provide an opinion on Gawker’s pay model

The ultimate flaw in the company’s logic regarding its pay scheme seems obvious. The website’s income should escalate when the site’s pageviews rise—unless, for instance, some high-end advertisers regard it as too tabloid a product, and ad rates have dropped. (Unlikely.)

So more ad inventory—actual pages served—should mean more income for the company—particularly since Gawker seems to be mostly increasing in pageviews not attached to any writer. At the same time, reducing the cost of the creation of that inventory also gets the company more of the income that is attached to a writer. Kicking down less money to the workers seems, at best, cheap.

Read the full article here.

Performancing.com has announced the winners of their 2007 Performancing Blog Awards. An excerpt from their announcement:

With help from our readers, Performancing chose 28 awards categories (one half of our collective brain wishes we could have done more, the other half wishes we had done less;-) and nominated six candidates per category.

With over 61,000 votes in one week of voting (Readers’ Choice) and ongoing behind the scenes deliberation (Editors’ Choice) we’ve selected the winners of this year’s Performancing Blog Awards.

Read the list of winners here.

Shiny Media reports that its Pies football sites (Arsenal Pies, Chelsea Pies, Liverpool Pies, Manunited Pies and Spurs Pies) have attracted over 600,000 readers last November — more than the half a million readers per month by the end of 2007 they hoped for in the August launch.

The network isn’t stopping there:

We are now aiming for one million readers per month across the whole network by the end of the season.

The Know More Media blog network has achieved two impressive milestones in the past days, underlining its growing strength and importance in the blogosphere today.

Last Tuesday, Know More Media announced their 10 millionth visit in less than two years:

Know More Media started just over 19 months ago with a handful of authors willing to band together to deliver business news and information to an audience eager for niche business news and information. Since then our network of blogs has expanded to more than 50 active business blogs and has passed several traffic milestones.

The following day, the blog network revealed that they have just published their 50,000th blog post:

If we assume that the average post is about 150 words, we have published at least 7,500,000 words, which is roughly the equivalent of 75 average full-length novels. When I consider the technology, time, and human power it takes to produce that much original content online, it becomes truly astounding.

Congratulations to Know More Media for both feats.

Taking the initiative in the growing concern for blog sites that are being infected or hacked, Google has launched an online security blog to take on the issue at hand. Some of these malicious practices include that of browser hijacks and spyware infections, most of which are not immediately detected by the site owners and make the lives of online viewers very much inconvenient. Here is an excerpt from the latest move by Google regarding online security:

Online security is an important topic for Google, our users, and anyone who uses the Internet. The related issues are complex and dynamic and we’ve been looking for a way to foster discussion on the topic and keep users informed. Thus, we’ve started this blog where we hope to periodically provide updates on recent trends, interesting findings, and efforts related to online security. Among the issues we’ll tackle is malware, which is the subject of our inaugural post.

Malware — surreptitious software capable of stealing sensitive information from your computer — is increasingly spreading over the web. Visiting a compromised web server with a vulnerable browser or plugins can result in your system being infected with a whole variety of malware without any interaction on your part. Software installations that leverage exploits are termed “drive-by downloads”. To protect Google’s users from this threat, we started an anti-malware effort about a year ago. As a result, we can warn you in our search results if we know of a site to be harmful and even prevent exploits from loading with Google Desktop Search.

Source: Introducing Google’s Online Security Efforts

[tags]online security, blog sites, blog networks, blog news, google blog, google news[/tags]