Nick Denton on Gawker Redesign: Only Facebook Matters
Gawker went live with its redesign on two of its web sites this morning, io9 and Jalopnik. — Interestingly, the Gawker redesign has stripped out Twitter and Stumble Upon—which used to sit next to each article …
Context & Ripple Effects
Denton has been reshaping Gawker's operation since the familiar-editor hire of December 2007, and the redesign going live on io9 and Jalopnik is his most public bet yet on where readers come from. The confirmed detail that matters: Twitter and StumbleUpon share buttons have been stripped from beside every article, leaving Facebook as the lone social pathway.
The timing cuts against Twitter specifically. In the week before launch, Twitter rolled out Connections, its own version of Facebook's Mutual Friends feature, while CEO Dick Costolo set out to prove the service can make money — and Gawker, one of the web's highest-traffic blog networks, is removing its button anyway.
First-order effects
- io9 and Jalopnik readers lose one-click sharing to Twitter and StumbleUpon, so share-driven referral traffic on both sites routes exclusively through Facebook.
- Twitter loses visible placement on two flagship Gawker properties at precisely the moment Costolo is trying to demonstrate the service can generate revenue.
Second-order effects
- Rival publishers watching the rollout face pressure to prune their own share-button rows down to whichever network demonstrably delivers readers, rather than offering every option by default.
- StumbleUpon and Twitter must now win back publisher real estate on product merit — a harder sell when a network operator as influential as Denton declares only Facebook matters.
Third-order effects
- If the redesign holds its audience, distribution leverage shifts further toward Facebook, turning publishers into tenants who optimize headlines and formats for a single referral engine they do not control.
- If Gawker's traffic suffers instead, the single-network thesis becomes the cautionary data point other publishers cite for keeping multi-platform sharing alive.
The trend: Web publishers are consolidating their distribution bets around Facebook as the default referral engine, forcing smaller social platforms to fight for shrinking placement on high-traffic media sites.