Gucci Little Piggy

Jezzie employing the Gawker business model in full force*:

We wrote about a man yesterday who hit on a model by writing “iamrich@google.com” on a napkin. “There is, of course, the chance that his name is ‘Rich?’” we surmised. As it happens, it is. We received this email today:

When the article’s author, Katie Baker, says “we” she means “Katie Baker”.  She wrote both the initial article calling Rich an “epic douchebag” and then the article apologizing for the mistake and then offering to play match-maker for the guy in case any readers wanted the hook up.

Meanwhile, pageviews were created out of thin air government make-work style.  The initial digging of the first unneeded ditch garnered 20,000 views and then the re-fill pulled, as of this writing, 30,000.

Do these types of things hurt Gawker Media and other practitioners of this game?  In the future will 50,000 cumulative page views be lost because people think “Eh, I’m not clicking on that post because there is a good chance that Gawker/Jezebel are wrong?”  We can only hope.

*I realize that my links play right into the model.  There isn’t much to be learned by clicking through.  This is a case of fighting the system from within.