Fox News Lies, Says Gawker Traffic Down 75% As Nick Denton Let’s Out Huge Yawn

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Here’s news that will surprise absolutely no one, Fox News fabricated site numbers this past week, attacking the Nick Denton-owned gossip site Gawker. According to Fox the sites falling apart, losing more than 75% of their visitors over the last eight months, there’s only one problem with those numbers, they are patently wrong.

Fox started their attack by discussing how irrelevant Gawker Media is becoming, apparently so irrelevant that both their number one rated News program and their website decided it necessary to cover the story.

According to Fox, the site is down 75% in traffic for the year, a number they captured through Compete.com’s analytics program.

Now let’s be very clear here for a moment, during the start of 2011 Gawker launched a redesign that drove many users away from the site, as often happens when users lose the familiarity of something they have come to love, however by May (as Compete shows) they began to rise in traffic once again (likely do to the ability to choose a blog format with more familiarity).

By July Gawker was back at 2.3 million unique visitors per month, a decrease of just 28 percent from January 2011 and 37 percent year-over-year. Yes those numbers are still rather large, but hardly the 75% Fox News claims the site has lost.

So how did News Corp. arrive at 75 percent? Apparently they compared apples to oranges or in this case they took April 2011 traffic and compared it to July 2010 traffic, providing the type of ridiculous type of numbers that the company typically reserves for inflated election night polling figures.

So why the attack on Gawker? Perhaps because News Corp wanted to take the focus off the hacking scandal and perhaps because Nick Denton says it’s a preemptive strike for a scathing article his news agency is about to publish that directly attacks Fox News.

It should also be noted that Quancast data shows Gawker doing better than Compete numbers.

If you really want to get into the specifics of the feud, check out Gawker Writer John Cook’s Fox News Response HERE.