When Gawker launched an aggressive redesign back in early February, the tech blogs were waiting to see what would happen. How would readers respond? (The assumption was that the reaction would be negative -- readers tend to avoid change and reject it when it's forced on them -- but nobody knew just how negative.) Starting about one week later, writers flooded the Internet with posts about not just the reaction -- "Gawker really effed this up" -- but also the numbers. Quantcast found that Gawker's traffic was cut in half, TechCrunch reported; Gizmodo's numbers were almost as bad. Nick Denton, the network's overseer, stood by his design and insisted that the readers would return.

But they haven't. Now that the complaints have, for the most part, slowed to a trickle and the tech blogs have stopped looking into Gawker's traffic numbers, we decided to dig in a bit. What does the network's traffic look like now that two and a half months have passed? Turns out, according to Gawker's public statistics, things are much, much worse than was originally reported. Yes, the redesign cut traffic in half almost instantly, but instead of coming back, even more readers left the site behind.

Here, a graph we put together using the number of unique visitors to the homepages of five sites in the Gawker network -- Gawker, Gizmodo, Jezebel, io9 and Deadspin -- from November through today.* The April numbers are only for the month to-date, but it isn't hard to see, now that we're twenty days in, how many of these sites will need a big boost to even reach March's traffic.