Gawker.com is to cease oper­a­tions after 13 years of oper­a­tions. The site was recent­ly sub­ject to a 140 mil­lion dol­lar law­suit, which cul­mi­nat­ed in the pub­li­ca­tion’s demise. If the Gawker.com archive is to be tak­en offline in its entire­ty (and there is cur­rent­ly no word to sug­gest oth­er­wise), it will mean an unprece­dent­ed removal of con­tent from a high-traf­fic online pub­li­ca­tion. But how much organ­ic search traf­fic and media val­ue will the site be like­ly to lose?

Background

The news that Gawker.com will be ceas­ing oper­a­tions this week, has been met with what can only be described as a mixed reac­tion.

There are some who have cham­pi­oned the pub­lish­er’s inde­pen­dence, and free­dom with which it afford­ed its writ­ers, how­ev­er, there are also those for whom the pub­li­ca­tion will not be missed.

Gawk­er’s forth­right style of jour­nal­ism has cer­tain­ly made the pub­li­ca­tion their fair share of ene­mies. The most notable of whom, Peter Thiel, was a man who played a key role in the site’s down­fall, and who once labeled Gawk­er a site which “ruined people’s lives for no rea­son.”

What we can say, is that as a pub­li­ca­tion, Gawk­er has always been unique amongst its peers, and that is reflect­ed in the nature of the site con­tent. “If you want[ed] com­plete free­dom to write what­ev­er the hell you want,” as a recent post put it, “you write on your per­son­al Tum­blr, where the whole world will ignore you. Gawk­er was one of the few places ever to exist that offered both a large, steady audi­ence and almost com­plete free­dom.”

It could, in oth­er words, make a fas­ci­nat­ing case study for which to dig a lit­tle deep­er into the data of a top flight online news and media pub­lish­er.

Which is why, with cur­rent­ly no word as to what will hap­pen to the Gawk­er archives at the end of this week, we’ve tak­en a clos­er look to see what Linkdex can reveal about Gawk­er from a con­tent and SEO per­spec­tive — a rare oppor­tu­ni­ty to peel back the lay­ers before the pub­li­ca­tion, and all it’s con­tent, dis­ap­pears from our radars for good.

Gawker.com: By the numbers

Data cov­ers the past 12 months of Gawker.com’s US oper­a­tions.

With Linkdex’s Vis­i­bil­i­ty fea­ture, we export­ed a list of gawker.com’s rank­ing key­words — with options to seg­ment by region or device. For the pur­pos­es of this study, we looked at all rank­ing key­words for the US and UK.

The Linkdex plat­form also pro­vid­ed the esti­mat­ed organ­ic traf­fic for the site, based on key­word rank­ing posi­tions, search vol­umes, and pro­pri­ety click-through rate cal­cu­la­tions.

From this the plat­form also cal­cu­lat­ed a val­ue for the total poten­tial media val­ue of the site in the US (which is the cost-per-click val­ue for all rank­ing key­words mul­ti­plied by search vol­ume for each key­word). This is how much all of Gawk­er’s traf­fic would cost if it was all obtained via paid search based on cur­rent Google Adwords CPC val­ues.

In this instance, the total esti­mat­ed traf­fic is 2.24 mil­lion vis­its per month, giv­ing a poten­tial media val­ue of $3.93 mil­lion.

Most frequently used tags (for any page winning organic traffic)

Gawker.com is some­what uncon­ven­tion­al for a news and media pub­lish­er in that site con­tent is not struc­tured around inbuilt cat­e­gori­sa­tion, but instead a metic­u­lous tag­ging sys­tem — i.e. a set of hor­i­zon­tal, rather than ver­ti­cal tax­onomies.

Whilst there is no nav­i­ga­tion bar, there are ded­i­cat­ed land­ing pages for each tag — gawker.com/tag/top for exam­ple, /tag/­too-insid­ery, or even /tag/tag (!)

The total num­ber of tags, for all con­tent across the site’s life­time, was revealed ear­li­er this week by Gawk­er­da­ta — show­ing that media and pol­i­tics were their most cov­ered top­ics.

For a slight­ly dif­fer­ent spin on this, we looked at the data from an organ­ic search per­spec­tive. Here are the most fre­quent­ly used tags from all rank­ing pages (any arti­cle or page, that has been receiv­ing organ­ic search traf­fic in the last 12 months).

Some of these tags, such as ‘Top’, ‘Jezebel’, or ‘Val­ley­wag’, refer to sis­ter pub­li­ca­tions, fil­tered tag pages, or relat­ed blogs.

What the results do illus­trate, is Gawk­er’s 2016 shift towards pol­i­tics — with pop­u­lar use of ‘don­ald trump’, ‘pol­i­tics’, and ‘elec­tion 2016’, and decreased use of ‘media’ and ‘jour­nal­is­mism’ (which were pop­u­lar tags in the afore­men­tioned Gawk­er­da­ta study across the site’s life­time).

Most visible content, grouped by tag

By piv­ot­ing on tags and esti­mat­ed traf­fic, we can get an idea of what the most vis­i­ble tag groups on Gawk­er are. In many cas­es, authors have used mul­ti­ple tags for a post, so the fol­low­ing graph shows the organ­ic search equi­ty (com­bined esti­mat­ed traf­fic) across all tags (where traf­fic for posts with mul­ti­ple tags is summed for each tag).

This gives us a pret­ty good sense of what the most read top­ic areas on Gawk­er are in the US…

Fil­ter­ing out cer­tain top­ics gives us the most cov­ered indi­vid­u­als, as well as those attract­ing the great­est vis­i­bil­i­ty from organ­ic search.

On clos­er inspec­tion, the large amount of esti­mat­ed traf­fic for ‘don­ald trump jr’, ‘jared kush­n­er’ and ‘new york city’, is due to promi­nent vis­i­bil­i­ty of this arti­cle.

Here’s the same process applied to indi­vid­u­als only —  the most vis­i­ble con­tent tagged with an indi­vid­ual:

(Tags which exist­ed almost exclu­sive­ly across the same posts, and thus show­ing very sim­i­lar val­ues, such as those of the ‘kush­n­er fam­i­ly’ have been grouped).

Media Value

If the Gawk­er archive is to be removed in its entire­ty, that’s $3.93 mil­lion in media val­ue that will be fil­ter­ing its way onto com­peti­tor sites.

Plot­ting the 300 most valu­able key­words by media val­ue on a bub­blechart, shows us that there are a few huge­ly valu­able indi­vid­ual key­words, the most notable of which being ‘don­ald trump jr’.

(Click and drag a box to zoom)

Summary

The Gawk­er archive is huge and expan­sive — so much so that in-depth analy­sis is chal­leng­ing — and their con­tent cov­ers a huge range of top­ics and indi­vid­u­als. How­ev­er, analy­sis of arti­cle tags does show a shift towards pol­i­tics in the last year, with tags such as ‘don­ald trump’, ‘pol­i­tics’, and ‘elec­tion 2016’ amoung the most fre­quent­ly used in the past year.

Indi­vid­u­als that have been tagged in posts also show the pub­li­ca­tions polit­i­cal focus, with promi­nent US politi­cians such as Don­ald Trump and Eliz­a­beth War­ren, amongst the most fre­quent­ly tagged (i.e. covered/referenced often). Posts with these tags were also amongst the most vis­i­ble in Google.

Media val­ue for Gawk­er’s rank­ing key­words, totalling $3.93 mil­lion in the US, shows this val­ue is com­prised of a few high val­ue key­words. Inter­est­ing­ly, these are for indi­vid­u­als, and polit­i­cal­ly focused ‘don­ald trump jr’, ‘arnold schwarzeneg­ger’, which sug­gests the val­ues may relate to tran­sient polit­i­cal cam­paigns.

Nonethe­less, it’s clear that the removal Gawk­er’s con­tent archive will have a sig­nif­i­cant impact, and result in a great deal of lost traf­fic and media val­ue.