On Feburary 7th, 2011, the entire Gawker Media style changed from a typical one you’d see on a blog to a hipper more programmed feel. The design focused on a top story and then listed out others along the side in a static bar.

Some people called it horrific, some used the word “satanic“. Well all of those negative words about Gawker’s redesign can probably be put to rest.

According to a few tweets from Gawker head honcho Nick Denton today, the network saw a lift of over 10 million monthly unique visitors from this point last year:

Yep, January’s in. 35.6m people globally: tinyurl.com/janglobal Interesting: no lift from trade shows. yfrog.com/mmg26xp

— Nick Denton (@nicknotned) February 2, 2012

For obsessive Gawker watchers and redesign doom-mongers: the 35.6m uniques in Jan 2012 is record and 55% up from last April’s nadir.

— Nick Denton (@nicknotned) February 2, 2012

It seems like the redesign didn’t scare people away after all, as you can tell by the graph that Denton includes with this tweet. With 35.6m unique visitors in January, the network just saw its best traffic ever.

So just when you think something is so radical and can’t work simply because it’s different, remember Gawker’s redesign. It actually worked.

Sites belonging to Nick Denton’s Gawker Media network have gradually received major facelifts over the past couple of days, introducing a new style that ensures popular articles are never buried by the constant addition of fresh content.

In regards to the redesign, many hate it, many love it, some couldn’t care less, we’re sure Denton couldn’t care. However, one thing that might concern its founder ever-so-slightly is the fact that not one piece of content published from any of his web properties in the last 24 hours has been crawled by Google News – in fact the last time anything from Lifehacker was indexed by Google News was two days ago.

The irregularity was spotted by Mark Carrey, who performed a search on Google’s news portal using the “site:gawker.com” operator. Typically, this would display a list of articles published on Gawker.com, and the user would be able to select specific date filters to view content published during a certain period:

As you can see, Google News hasn’t indexed one piece of content from Gawker.com in 24 hours, and any content that is listed was published before the new design was pushed live. Lifehacker, Gizmodo and other Gawker properties are affected also.

It begs the question; has Gawker’s makeover resulted in the network being swiftly ommitted from search results or is there something more to it?

Google News can provide a steady source of traffic to a website, particularly when a story is breaking, news items are often listed at the top of a Google Search for popular queries. Whilst the referrals might be small to a large network to Gawker, I can’t imagine Nick Denton would dismiss the portal entirely.

We have contacted Gawker and Google News representatives to clarify if this indeed an error on Gawker’s part or a glitch in the way Google News collates stories, we will update you as soon as we receive a response.

Update: We have received word from Scott Kidder, Director of Editorial Operations at Gawker Media who notes that the issue seems to be a bug in the new Gawker redesign. The issue was “discovered yesterday” and they “hope to have it resolved soon”.

The internal memo pasted below, sent to the Gawker staff from their chief technology officer Thomas Plunkett, reveals that the Gawker Hacker disaster happened in large part due to a lack of preparation and commitment by the media giant’s tech team. He apologizes to the staff and promises to be much more communicative in the future.

From: Thomas Plunkett

Subject: The Gawker Media security breach — status and moving forward
To: [Gawker staff]
Date: Friday, December 17, 2010, 4:43 PM

Everyone -

As you know, this has been the Gawker tech team’s most difficult week ever. This note has been too long coming, but the following is meant to communicate several things: what happened, our current activities, and our plans for moving forward. I suggest you read all of this as I am making several recommendations below, and we are implementing some changes that will affect all of you.

What Happened
Gawker Media servers and some company email accounts were compromised by hackers at some time during the last few weeks; the compromise was made public to us (and everyone else) this past weekend. In recent weeks, intruders were able to gain access to our web servers by exploiting a vulnerability in our source code, allowing them to gain access to user data and passwords. With this information, they were able to gain access to the editor wiki, some Gawker Media email accounts, and other external resources.

It is clear that the Gawker tech team did not adequately secure our platform from an attack of this nature. We were also not prepared to respond when it was necessary. These things can be attributed to several factors.

First, we never planned for such an event, and therefore had no systems, or processes in place to adequately respond. Our focus as a team (and company) has been on moving forward. This put up blinders on several fronts. As a result, numerous wrong decisions were made by me this past weekend in responding to the security breach.

Further, attention to completed work is every bit as important as attention to upcoming work. Our development efforts have been focused on new product while committing relatively little time to reviewing past work. This is often a fatal mistake in software development and was central to this vulnerability.

Finally, we have not only seen tremendous growth as a company, we have never been afraid to take an unpopular or controversial stance with regard to individuals or organizations. Let’s face it: we draw the ire of many. This creates a unique set of demands to meet rapid growth as well as threats that often specifically target us. We did not establish standards and practices to handle growth and the fact that we have a target on our back.

On several fronts — technically, as well as customer support and communication — we found ourselves unprepared to handle this eventuality. The tech team should have been better prepared, committed more time to perform thorough audits, and grown our team’s technical expertise to meet our specific business needs. As a result of not having done these things, we have not adhered to standards expected of us, and our response was inadequate. The remedy to this situation will not be immediate, but it will be swift as possible.

Current Activity: Regaining Control
The tech team have moved our operation to the third floor of the Gawker Media office in order to focus on the work that needs to be done. We are currently in the process of performing a complete review of what happened with an independent security firm.

Here’s what we’ve done so far to regain control:

We have been able to establish a fairly complete timeline of intrusion activity, and have identified compromised assets within Gawker. We have re-established control of compromised systems including our Google Apps accounts. As a result, you will have to reconfigure your Google Apps access (more on this below).

In addition, we have addressed all known vulnerabilities and will continue auditing our system for security flaws, and we have made appropriate changes to administrative accounts to our web and application infrastructure. There are many people reviewing our code base, and because of this, we will also reach out to members of the technical community to harness their expertise. This process will continue as we move to an entirely new, hardened web infrastructure.

We have introduced a help desk to address commenter concerns related to the breach. This will continue to exist as long as it is needed. Scott, Greg, Jeremy, Nick and a host of interns, and many of you, have been active in the threads, and communicating as much as possible as we work through this event.

Moving Forward
We’ve learned many lessons from this experience, both as a tech team, as a company, and as individuals. If there’s one lesson nearly all of us learned, it’s that we can and must be smarter with passwords. Lifehacker is a great resource for password advice (and there are many others). I suggest you start here: http://lifehacker.com/184773/geek-to-live–choose-and-remember-great-passwords.

Efffective immediately, we have enabled SSL, a more secure method of communicating over the internet, for all users with Gawker Media accounts on Google Apps (this does not affect your personal Gmail). Those of you not using web-based Gmail will have to reconfigure your clients (this includes any desktop mail client as well as other devices). The attached document provides instructions to make this easier, and includes information to configure different devices including iPhone, Android and Blackberry phones.

Also effective immediately: If you require access to sensitive materials (legal, financial, or accounting documents) on Google Docs, you must have two-factor authentication setup on your account. No documents will be shared with personal Gmail accounts. We are also strongly encouraging all staff to setup two-factor authorization even if you do not require access to sensitive material.

We will enforce a policy that sensitive information not be posted to the editor wiki. This policy will also apply to chat communications (e.g., Campfire, AIM).

On all of our sites, we will be introducing several new features to our commenting system to acknowledge the reality that we have lost the commenters’ trust and don’t deserve it back. We should not be in the business of collecting and storing personal information, and our objective is to migrate our platform away from any personal data dependencies (like email & password). We will push further integration of external account verification sources using OAuth (like Facebook, Twitter, and Google) for those that want to use them, and we’ll also be introducing disposable accounts. Disposable accounts are similar to the service a pre-paid phone offers to drug dealers (a disposable, untraceable communication device). Commenters seeking anonymity will be able to do so confident that when necessary they can simply toss out the account and there will be no connection to the individual. They will work like this:
- no password will be stored
- no email will be stored
- account can be used as long as you have the key code; lose or delete it, the account is abandoned.

In addition, we are establishing a public Gawker Tech & Product blog (a long time coming) from which we will communicate product information as well as product plans to our readers. You can expect to see it by early next week.

This has been a very unfortunate event in Gawker Media history, and we have learned much from it. Above all, this has been an enormous inconvenience for everyone affected, and for this I apologize. You can expect a much more responsive and proactive technology and product team for 2011. You can also expect a much more public me — if there is one critical thing that has been missing, it is a lack of consistent communication from me. That will change.

Regards,

Tom Plunkett

We just wrote a post on the easiest way to check if your e-mail address is on Gawker‘s Hacker List, but we realize it may have been a little tricky.

Our good friends at Slate have built a simple widget to find  out whether your info was indeed on Gawker’s hacked list. Just type in your e-mail address and voila. Test it out here. It looks like this:

Phew!

UPDATE: A significant update to this story can be found here.

Looking at some of the tweets posted to the Gizmodo Twitter account, it looks as if Gawker Media’s portfolio of web properties may have been hacked, the messages suggesting 1.5 million usernames and passwords have been compromised as a result.

The first tweet announced “SUPPORT WIKILEAKS”, before a more worrying message emerged reading “Gawker.com Gizmodo.com Lifehacker.com hacked, 1.5 million usernames/emails/passwords taken”.

Visiting the websites in question, Gizmodo, Gawker and Lifehacker all appear to be functional and do not look to have been defaced. As we write, the tweets have been deleted.

We managed to grab a screenshot before they disappeared:

Evidence suggests that the Twitter account password was compromised and used to spread false information, one tweet mentions the ongoing feud between Anonymous (famous for the Wikileaks revenge attacks on Mastercard, Visa and Paypal) and writers of the Gawker.com website.

If Anonymous is behind the attack, it adds to overwhelming surge of publicity the movement has been getting as of late. Members of Anonymous have already mobilised to down the websites of companies that have publicly withdrawn services utilised by the Wikileaks website.

Update: Christopher Mascari, writer for Gizmodo, has confirmed the websites’ Twitter account was compromised:

It seems that every time a blog under the Gawker Media banner breaks a major, internet-consuming story — whether it’s an iPhone prototype, nude pictures of Brett Favre, or a first-person account of a 25-year-old’s sleepover with Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell — there’s a certain subset of media critics who focus on Gawker-owner Nick Denton’s payment for the scoop. This despite the fact that paying for stories is a rather common business decision made by dozens of news outlets, including tabloid magazines and even major TV news networks (who pay exorbitant “licensing fees” to gain access to exclusive photos, which almost always result in an exclusive interview as well).

Perhaps the reason is, in part, because Gawker is a relatively new web start-up and online news isn’t particularly well known for paying its writers very well, much less dropping thousands of dollars for a single post. It was just a few years ago when Denton was paying $10 per post to some of his writers. So I wondered how Gawker calculates whether it will pay for a scoop, and how much? Why was the iPhone story (13 million views) worth $5,000, the Christine O’Donnell story (1.2 million views) worth a “low four figures,” and the Brett Favre pics (4.6 million views) worth “less than $20,000“?

Gawker’s editor-in-chief Remy Stern told me in a phone interview that while he can’t speak for the sister blogs, Gawker is approached at least once a week with some kind of pay-for-play scoop and at least 95 percent of them are deemed not worth paying for. “If it’s someone who has a photo, they’ll say something like, ‘I have these photos,’ and they’ll describe them but won’t actually send the photos. They’ll sort of want to talk about it, or want to discuss an arrangement, and this is something that indicates they’re looking to be paid. It tends to be when someone approaches us; we’re not going out with our hand out to pay for things. Sometimes there’s an intermediary — someone else will approach us — someone we know or someone we don’t know who says they know a company who’s looking to sell something … In most cases it’s something that we wouldn’t be interested in and we can eliminate it right off the bat. In other cases, I’ll have a discussion with our person and see what they have and what they’re looking to do. We don’t have massive amounts of money to pay people for stories.”

The editors will first consult with Denton, but Stern said that it’s not uncommon for the media mogul to leave the decision up to an individual site’s editor. “We’re taking a bit of a chance in all these cases that whatever we pay for is going to be worth it,” he explained. “You have tabloids that are paying astronomical amounts of money for things, and that’s not how we operate. So we’re not fairly competitive with these glossy tabloids who have lots of money to throw around.”

The editor said that the decision to pay for a story is based on a “gut feeling,” adding that there are some rough calculations as to how many unique visitors a story would attract, something that’s “hard to turn into an exact science.” A political story before a large election, for instance, may be worth more because it has the opportunity for a bigger “draw.” Surprisingly, Gawker will sometimes pay for a story that wouldn’t be considered a huge traffic driver because it “is important to our audience,” meaning that it’s also focused on the long-time retention of current readers. As for the O’Donnell story, Stern said that it had far exceeded his expectations.

Shortly after the iPhone 4 story broke, Denton claimed that he was not able to directly monetize all the page views because the ad sales are made in advance. In fact, he said he actually lost money in the short term. The benefit, he explained, was the long term branding opportunity for Gizmodo, which has enjoyed a significant increase in daily traffic since the story broke. “It certainly is a long term traffic benefit because you hopefully have new readers come to the site and stick around,” said Stern. “If it attracts 100,000 new visitors, and 200 or 500 of those people decide to check out the site every day and become regular readers, then you’re sort of building audience over time with these big scoops. It’s not an immediate ad benefit. In fact, in the case of some of these controversial high profile stories, there aren’t ads running on those posts anyway.”

One reason Gawker may decide not to pay for an item is if there’s no story attached to it. “We’re not just buying nude photos of some celebrity,” he said. “We’re kind of looking for a different kind of story usually. We usually like to find something where it’s part of a package; there’s a little bit of a tale to tell. For instance with the O’Donnell story, there was this hypocrisy that we found interesting and it was a lot more than simply ‘Here, look at these photos.’”

Of course the best scoops not only allow Gawker to publish the story itself, but to actually become part of the story. If you didn’t hear about the iPhone 4 prototype when it first hit Gizmodo, you likely heard of it when editor Jason Chen’s home was raided by police, who then seized his computers. That’s the kind of scoop that not even Nick Denton can buy.