Turns out that not everything that people claim as ‘lost,’ really is. Word is sprouting that Gizmodo paid some $10,000 US for that little gadget.
If that is the case, they got it for a song. Gizmodo has been racking up millions of pageviews on the story as it storms across Digg, Reddit, and Twitter. It is the biggest story that we have seen this quarter.
A full, new, Apple phone, months before anyone hoped to get a poor camera shot of an out-of-date prototype? Scoop of the year for Gizmodo, and a major medal in the ongoing war between Engadget and Gizmodo for dominance in the gadget world.
This is a graph of Gizmodo traffic for the day, two hours behind as the surge broke their analytics program:
Count up the millions of hits and then calculate the Gizmodo CPM rate and multiply. Giz made a pile of money off of that $10,000 purchase.
People are worrying about how this will hurt Gizmodo and Apple, and that is a very, very fair thought. For now, however, Gizmodo is cleaning up. Today, Gizmodo won.
And if you are a lawyer, it is illegal to purchase goods that you know are stolen, right?
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