Gawker, a news website, launched a vicious hit piece on Fusion.net Tuesday with a story headlined: “More People Work at Fusion Than Are Reading Its Most Popular Post.”
In the post, the writers claim to have obtained a ‘screenshot’ of Fusion’s internal traffic metrics from a service called Chartbeat. The image, seen above, shows 681 concurrent users.
The article slams Fusion’s pay of staff and says there were only seven users reading a breaking news story.
The Gawker piece went on to say, quote: “Our most recent Fusion traffic screenshot shows 706 concurrent visitors—that’s over $42,000 per reader.”
The editor-in-chief of Fusion, Alexis C. Madrigal, tweeted this response:
Since the story gained traction, a new screenshot was added by Gawker in the comments section of the article. Sam Biddle posted the image and wrote: “For context and the spirit of fairness:”
We’re no analytics experts but that’s quite the leap in numbers.
Fusion hasn’t yet released an official statement on the hit piece. If they do, we will update this story.
