How valuable is a new product ‘scoop?’

This is a screencap of Gizmodo’s big scoop taken around midnight PT.  The post’s been up about 15 hours.  Two things strike me about this picture.  (1) Giz pulled in 4M visitors to this one page in about 15 hours, and (2) there’s only a single ad on the whole page, and it blends right in.  

I don’t know what to make of that. On one hand, Gawker is pushing to become a more legitimate news community, so maybe they wanted to deliver a pure “scoop” for their readers.  Of course, 

On the other hand, the post immediately preceding this one got only 18,000 views in the same time frame.  Here’re Gizmodo’s pageview stats through this year (thanks, Quantcast):

Pretty solidly cyclical with regular dives on weekends (clearly a workday site).  Crazy spike for the iPad announcement in late January, but no lasting effects.  We can see that one-off pageviews bonanzas don’t seem to create loyal leaders on their own, so the strategic benefits of a big news item appear minimal (I know it’s just one data point, but it makes intuitive sense).  

At a micro level, though, we can pretty easily value a “scoop” from this chart.    During the iPad reveal in January, Gawker they nearly tripled that number.  For a site that does about $5k/day in ad revenue, that’s pretty big.  I’m sure today’s traffic will end up looking very similar.

So much about this is interesting.  Many narratives to think through.  I need to sleep now, but I’m excited to see what happens with Gizmodo’s traffic…