July 2004 Archives

« June 2004 | Main | August 2004 »

Google IPO questions

I'm a financial journalist, but I've never pretended to understand the stock market. Bonds, yes; stocks, no. A recent Reuters story, for instance, includes this bizarre segue:

``In a deal like that where it's priced for perfection, anything that occurs that isn't right on the number, you get hammered,'' said Jim Huguet, chief executive officer of Great Companies LLC. The Florida firm manages $230 million in technology shares.
Of the thousands of U.S. public companies in the United States, barely more than a dozen have prices above $100 per share and trade at least 10,000 shares a day. As of mid-afternoon Monday, none of the Nasdaq-100 stocks (.NDX) or the components of the Morgan Stanley High Tech Index traded over $90 a share.

The US stock market is obsessed with dollar price – you often hear people jumping up and down saying that such-and-such a company just rose or fell $5 on the day, without bothering to mention what the bloody thing is selling at. This is just another example of the same syndrome: the journalist clearly reckons that being "priced for perfection" is more or less the same thing as being priced above $100 a share.

The way I see it, pricing the shares in the triple-digit realm is basically a way of deterring speculators and trying to ensure, as much as possible, that the people who enter bids in the IPO are the buy-and-hold investors that Google is looking for, rather than small day-traders. It probably doesn't make a whole lot of difference, but I reckon that a $20 stock going to $24 in the course of a week is probably slightly more likely than a $130 stock going to $156 in the same timeframe. So if you want to decrease volatility, price high.

The key way that Google is ensuring low volatility, however, is through its use of a Dutch auction. I've touched on this before, but basically the price is set by investors, not underwriters, which means that no one's going to buy with the intention of selling almost immediately. Daniel Gross says in Slate today that "most professional investors will likely boycott the offering" – but that doesn't really matter: they'll have to buy sooner or later (and sooner rather than later, I think), and so will provide a natural offset to the phenomenon of the "winner's curse" which is often associated with auctions.

But amidst all the concentration on the style of IPO that Google has chosen, I get the feeling that people are overlooking some rather obvious questions. So, here are two of my own; I'm sure there are more. If anybody would like to hazard an answer, I'd be very interested.

1. What's with the fees and the underwriters? Google has two lead underwriters – Morgan Stanley and CSFB. Normally, IPO underwriters have a lot of work to do: they have to value the company, set an issue price, and market the shares to investors. In this case, they can basically sit back and let the internet do the work for them: they simply issue the prospectus, wait for the bids to roll in, and then use those bids to set the offer price. Not a single phone call needs to be made to a single investor.
Daniel Gross says that "to add insult to the injury of the chastened investment bankers, Google has decreed that it'll only pay a 3 percent underwriting fee" – but in an offering that could reach $3.3 billion, a 3% fee comes to an extremely respectable $100 million. Does anybody really think that the banks are doing $100 million's worth of work on this deal?
Even more puzzlingly, Google has taken its two lead underwriters and saddled them with 29 – count 'em – extra underwriters, comprising pretty much all of Wall Street and then some. What on earth are 31 underwriters supposed to do in this deal? They're not drumming up investors, so what's their role, beyond earning fees?

2. Why is Google selling 14 million shares? A large part of the reason why Google didn't go public ages ago is that it has no need for cash. It is minting money, actually – even after paying for what is probably the largest, most expensive and most sophisticated server farm in the world, it made $79 million last quarter, and is now sitting on $548 million in cash. That's enough money to buy one hell of a lot of Bloggers: it's hard to see what use the present half-billion is to Google, let alone the $1.7 billion or so it stands to receive from the IPO.
There are, of course, good reasons for the IPO beyond raising money for Google. Most obviously, Google was funded with venture capital, and venture capitalists want an exit strategy. Existing shareholders are selling about 10 million shares in total, which is much more than enough to give Google an unambiguous stock-market valuation and, should it need it, a currency for further acquisitions. My question pertains to the 14 million shares Google is selling over and above that number, with the proceeds going, we're told, "for general corporate purposes". If Google is already profitable, what use has it for having $2.2 billion sitting in the bank?
Raising equity, for a company like Google which is likely to sell at more than 150 times its previous four quarters' earnings, is cheap. But even so, is the accumulation of an enormous pile of cash really the use to which Google shareholders would like to see the company's equity put? Or is there (and I'm genuinely ignorant here) some kind of rule which says that a company has to sell at least as many shares in an IPO as its existing shareholders do? Absent such a law, I simply can't see why Google is doing this.

Posted by Felix at 19:29 EST | Comments (11)

A triptet for Thirty

house-party

I'm having a party tonight and you're all invited. I hope you can make it – it would be cool to see some new faces for an evening, a novelty you could say. Not that we're bored of the faces that are here... it would just be a change.

Anyway, I'm having a house-party, at my home, and I'd love you to be there. You can take the number thirty-two bus and ask the driver to drop you off at the corner... he normally doesn't mind as it's fairly friendly in these parts. Not like in the big smoke. There's plenty of room to crash if you want to stay for the weekend too.

I think we'll have pizza and I'm hoping for a chocolate cake ... I've dropped enough hints ("what would you like for your birthday, Rhian?"- "Chocolate cake") but you never can be sure about these things. I'm pretty sure that Scorpio will be there, and the moon, but I've unfortunately been seeing less and less of Orion lately. I miss him but know he's out there still, keeping watch over me. It's funny – the light seems to have returned surprisingly fast and I already miss the midday stars. I loved the peace of permanent night. Others on base are reborn though since midwinter has passed – it's like you can visibly see them re-enthuse with every extra photon of light we receive, each lengthened hour.

I remember the first day when the sky was so red and clear that I could see the Rumples again. I'd forgotten there was a horizon you could focus on... odd to have my immediate surroundings expand so suddenly. But in another way they have shrunk, back down to an earthly proportion: now I see distant buildings and coastline features where previously I saw stars and other galaxies. Don't forget there are other days when you can't see beyond your outstretched arm, but that happens year-round. It is all magical.

We went outside at 2pm today (for melt-tank and photos) and were amazed how light it was – you wouldn't even think of taking a torch on this weather. There was a light dusky blue in every direction and faint hint of red to the north. Not a stunning National Geographic type day but a lovely day, a normal day, a day when I appreciate how much I like being here. It's 3:30pm now and thankfully dark again. This is the Halley I love the best.

What makes me smile is realising that eight weeks ago, in exactly the same light conditions, I was commenting on how short the days were. Now it's the nights that are getting shorter. Soon we'll be living in day and night and that ordinariness of diurnal variation will return. And after that, the midnight sun and sunglasses 24-7. It's all happening very quickly, but maybe I'm just entering that time of year again when the changes are most noticeable. We still have four or five months before the first plane arrives and about eight before we get home, so I needn't worry that it'll go by too quickly. I just don't want to miss anything along the way.

aurora (written at 4am, very sleepy)

There is an impression that down here we see auroras, haloes and sundogs the whole time. So much so that we become almost passé about them - yet another aurora lighting my way to the lab, the antarctic street lamps.

Not so. I have now seen two or three stunners and a couple of cloud-like wisps during my time here. They almost always happen at night and some years more vividly than others. This year has not been prolific in its atmospheric light shows. We have an 'aurora wake-up list' on the wall of the mess room but until last night it has only been used once before.

This morning the night watchman woke me at 3am: "Rhian, there's a bit of an aurora outside, it's not amazing but it's something". When I got outside I was glad to have got up but he was right – it was cool but not heavenly.

To start with.

There was a big streak to the north stretching horizontally across the sky, with patches above it, as though dabbed onto the night canvas afterwards with a dry, short-bristled brush. To the south were also a few patchy clouds of light. As my eyes began to adjust, so too did the light. The patches became swirls, the clouds, spirals, before dissolving back into the night sky or metamorphosing into a duller version of its former self. The whole sky had these patches of light on a dark background. To orient myself, I located Scorpio and the southern cross, unusually far to the west (to my work-day eye) which shone out bright on the pitch black background. For a while I gazed at the stars, forgetting the aurora completely. It was a beautiful night even without these light clouds.

As my nose was getting colder and I started thinking of going in, the light show began to kick off. Patches expanded and flickered in the brightness like a pulsating dance of light in the sky, and as they pulse, the seem to draw together to an apex above our heads, the top of a cone from which luminescent light then starts to pour. It's dazzling. The whole sky gets filled with this smoke, pouring in between me and Scorpio, forming a veil of light around the atmosphere of the Earth. This is an earthly dance, like clouds: you can feel how much closer it is than the stars. The bursts to the south that were formerly patches above the CASLab have formed an S-swirl now and the stripe to the north grown to fill the whole sky, not linear any more, organic.The intensity is always varying, flickering, moving around the hovering light patches, adding brightness here, dissolving the veil there. The movement makes me laugh out loud. Dynamic. Alive. But very much an atmospheric phenomenon. A dance of wispish light in the sky.

birthday

I celebrated my thirtieth birthday last week, it was great. Thirty in Antarctica!

Thankyou for the emails, the good wishes, the cards and letters that missed the post, the presents unwrapped when I was still 28,- a guitar, a watch, a big birthday hug. I've been looking forward to this so much it's amazing that any celebration would suffice. But it was brilliant. I went out to the caboose on Tuesday night and stayed until Thursday morning. Different people joined me at different times and for a few blissful hours I was alone as well, in a caboose, in antarctica on my birthday. Who could ask for more?! If I could, I think I would live in a caboose forever. Maybe I'll have to find a caravan or boat when I get back. Maybe these places are all an essence of the same place. And to have an impromptu party out there was even better. I haven't been able to have people 'pop by' for years now and I suddenly realised how much I missed that. "Would you like to pop by for dinner?" I asked over the radio and that night Vanessa, Steph, Frank, Craig and Jeff all appeared at different times to share different parts of the evening's celebrations. Steph, bless him, even brought a bottle of bubbly and some glasses out there. So all that is missing now from this week of celebrations is a chocolate cake.. and that, I think, might be my special treat tonight.

Hope to see you later!

Love Rhian.

Posted by Rhian at 0:12 EST | Comments (1)

The WTC panel

I wasn't the only person to get up early in order to go to a "professional forum" at the Center for Architecture in Greenwich Village on the subject of the World Trade Center site. The auditorium was packed, mostly with men in suits, who looked remarkably alert for 8 o'clock in the morning. The meeting was off the record, which means I won't tell you who said what. I can tell you, though, because the details are on the AIA website, that the panel discussion included most of the important stakeholders, including Daniel Libeskind, Michael Arad (the memorial designer), and Jeffrey Holmes, from SOM, who's working on the Freedom Tower. Kevin Rampe from the LMDC was also there, along with Tony Cracciola from the Port Authority and Vishaan Chakrabarty from the New York City department of planning. The whole thing was run by New York New Visions.

The only major stakeholder who wasn't there was Larry Silverstein, who yesterday got served with a lawsuit from Libeskind demanding $843,750 in architectural fees. We were told at the very beginning of the two-hour session that there wasn't "enough time" to talk about the Freedom Tower – the only thing on the site which is actually being built at the moment – so we're none the wiser about what this landmark building is actually going to look like, how tall it's going to be, or anything along those lines. I, for one, have learned nothing new since I wrote my WTC update in February, beyond the fact that the complicated site-wide ramping system for truck deliveries probably won't be finished in time for the Freedom Tower's completion. In the interim, it looks as though the tower will be serviced from an entrance on the Vesey Street side of where the new performing arts center is going to be, with a possible elevator system maximising the number of trucks and cars that can be dealt with in a very small footprint.

In fact, there are still some questions about whether the ramping system will go ahead as planned, with the entrance to it, on Liberty Street, being described as "universally disliked". One suggestion was that a building of some description could be built on top of the ramp entrance, framing the new Liberty Park and making the cut look a bit less ugly.

And in general, it was hard to see why this panel was so ostentatiously off-the-record, given that no one said anything particularly newsworthy. A couple of pointed questions were asked, but in general it was something of a love-fest, with everybody making extremely nice noises about Libeskind, and – more surprisingly – everybody also standing up for the absent Silverstein's right to build 10 million square feet of office space on the site. Lip service was paid to having "vibrant street life" and all the rest of it, but it was very clear that Silverstein's need for commercially viable floor plates will ultimately drive decisions as to, for instance, whether Cortlandt Street will be open to the sky.

Dey Street, however, will certainly be open – the only question is whether it will be pedestrian or open to cars. There will therefore be a new public space to the south-west of the PATH terminal, north of Dey and east of Greenwich, and there was a fair amount of speculation as to what might go there – people seemed quite keen on "kiosks", although I wasn't entirely clear on what they meant by that. The Greenmarket could go there, too.

On the other side of Greenwich from the new public space will be the International Freedom Center – apparently a museum dedicated to human rights and the memory of September 11 – and the Drawing Center. But everybody seems keen that this development not get in the way of people going to the memorial proper from the PATH station or the north-east more generally. The memorial will be approachable from every direction, including the west – apparently it's only going to be a few steps up from West Street to the flat memorial space.

The issue of burying West Street was raised, dropped, raised again, and not really ever addressed: Pataki likes the idea, although it would be very expensive, and the residents of Battery Park City hate it. My guess is that the cost is too high and the benefit too low for the plan to go ahead, although at the margin it would make the WTC site cohere a lot more effectively with the World Financial Center and the Hudson River ferries.

Interestingly, in the midst of the fight over whether there's anywhere in New York suitable for a mass demonstration during the Republican National Convention, there seemed to be general agreement that the huge memorial space could be used for such gatherings if they were of a suitable nature: the Martin Luther King march on Washington was cited as a precedent.

As for the general feel of the public spaces in the site, we were told that fully half of all the retail would be above ground, which is great news. And below ground, especially in the huge retail concourses of the PATH station, will often be full of natural light thanks to the Calatrava oculus design. (Those concourses, we were told, will be as big or bigger than the grand room at Grand Central Terminal.)

We can also expect an announcement as to who will design the cultural buildings, both north and south of Fulton Street, in about six months. My guess is that Libeskind will end up getting at least the southern one, and possibly the northern one as well.

As for who's in charge of the site, it's still something of an alphabet soup. That said, however, a certain division of labor does seem to have emerged. Libeskind's still got a finger in every pie, as the master site planner. The LMDC is concentrating on the memorial (with Arad) and the cultural buildings, while the Port Authority is concentrating on the offices (with Silverstein), the retail shops, and the transportation hub. New York City is mostly interested in the street life of the neighborhood, recognising that it's more of a New York state site.

But the street design is important, with crucial decisions yet to be finalised. Will Fulton Street be a major two-way thoroughfare, exiting both north and south onto West Street? Will Greenwich Street be open to taxis and limousines between Vesey and Fulton? Will Greenwich Street between Fulton and Liberty be permanently clogged with both MTA and tourist buses? Will Cortlandt Street even exist?

In general, I think people left the meeting buzzing with more questions than answers. But I remain impressed by the quality of the professionals in charge of this project, and reasonably confident that if anybody can come up with a workable solution to the myriad of problems that the site throws up, they can. Even if some of them are suing each other in court.

Posted by Felix at 12:15 EST | Comments (4)

Gwathmey on Meier

The August issue of Vanity Fair – not online, of course – runs a letter from superstar architect Charles Gwathmey, responding to an article the magazine ran in June about Richard Meier's Perry Street towers:

I was disappointed by the article's inadvertent association of Richard Meier with complaints about the construction and condition of the buildings. What may be lost on those not familiar with the design and construction industries is that, while an architect is responsible for the architectural design of a project and may be in a position to advise the owner of observed contractor deviations from the design, he or she has limited control over the quality of construction, limited power to require that construction defects be remedied, and absolutely no input into the maintenance of a building after construction is completed. Therefore, it is truly a mixed blessing for well-known architects when their names are instantly associated with any project they design, both in the rave reviews for the quality of the design and in the frequently mixed (or worse) reviews for the quality of the construction.
What should be clearly acknowledged is not the internal power struggle nor what appear to be rectifiable construction and maintenance issues but, rather, the superb architecture of the Perry Street towers.

Poor Richard Meier, having his name associated with the buildings he designed! At the risk of sounding rather Blowhardish, I simply don't think you can divorce design from construction in quite as black-and-white a fashion as Gwathmey does here.

For one thing, I simply don't buy the idea that a megastar like Meier would be little more than a disposable freelancer on his first major New York project. To infer from Gwathmey's letter, Meier saw the site plan, designed the buildings, handed over the blueprints, and left the project in the hands of the developer, his job having been done. Sound like any big-name architect you've ever heard of? Me neither.

What's more, Meier designed a pair of structures which ostentatiously pushed the envelope of what New York contractors are used to building. If the building trades in this city are used to throwing up things like 90 Clinton Street, then you simply can't expect them to put together a state-of-the-art curtain wall without any kind of quality guarantee. Architecture is an applied art: if you're going to ask millions of dollars for an apartment, then you have to be sure that it's going to be first-rate in the real world, not simply on paper. Meier and the developer both have a responsibility here.

Gwathmey also raises the question of what "superb architecture" is, exactly. In his mind, it's clearly something divorced from construction, or the experience of actually living in the building. He's surely wrong on that front: a residential building can't be admitted into the architectural pantheon if its residents dislike living there.

If Meier had designed something which was within the abilities of the developer to build; if he had designed something which people liked to live in; if he had designed something which didn't stick out like a sore thumb in terms of the architecture along the Greenwich Village stretch of the Hudson riverfront; and if he had designed something which still, all the same, elicited the respect and awe of passersby – then I would confer the status of "superb architecture" on the Perry Street towers. A good architect can sit in his studio and design something iconic; a great one can do so while working within the host of real-world limitations that New York City uniquely provides.

Posted by Felix at 15:41 EST | Comments (7)

Winter

We've had some beautiful skies lately. Fire red. What's another word for sky? That whole space, dome, all the air, that void around you, the entire thing, the bell, the hemisphere is seems, fills with red. Excess light from a sun that is still focused on Spain and far below our horizon. When the globe is visible, it's so bright we just get white. So I like it shaded, this way we see the glory of the red. The sun's overflow of light.

It's not every day: just on clear days. Cloudy days are dark. So dark you trip over your feet. Which makes me realise – it's the cloud that makes days dark, that obscures the light, not the lack of sun. There's a moral in there somewhere. Like when you fly above the clouds in a plane and suddenly it becomes a glorious day despite the grizzliness below. But here, when you clamber above the clouds, the stars and sometime moon are waiting. That's the best bit. The night sky is so full of stories.

I've had a few emails lately from friends and colleagues. 'I hope you're not too lonesome down there', 'you must be pleased the light is returning', 'rest assured the worst is over', 'you're very brave' and so on and so forth. I appreciate the concern but feel like a bit of a con. Gnarly hard-core antarctic heroes and all that. One hundred and five days of darkness, temperatures so cold it doesn't matter whether you speak in Farenheit or Centigrade (they cross at -40), blizzard conditions, isolation, the extremes of communal living. It is all that, it is all that and more, but it's easier for me than navigating the streets of Manhattan, far less stressful, much simpler. There's no questioning what's happening when it's blowing a hoolie outside. More than that, the winter is comforting somehow. I know some of my companions are struggling a bit without the sun but so far it's been my favourite time of year. And when the clouds do part, well, there's nothing close to it that can touch on it. The entire sky is sunset light. The snow reflects pink. You realise that the sun, far away, really truly is a ball of fire. And you get to see the stars. I'll miss them most when the light returns. But like the clouds, I just have to remember that they're there, even if I can't see them.

I'm reading a book at the moment about the first international antarctic expedition in 1949-52 (Foothold on Antarctica by Charles Swithinbank). So far, it is all very familiar: the work, the weather, the struggles and highlights, even the clothing and equipment. Sixteen men wintering for 2 years to study science. It makes me smile when there are translations for words I use daily: sastrugi, dunnage, mirage. However much our society develops, some things here will never change. Dogs may leave, women and internet may arrive, but the place is the same, the conditions will always be the same, and, to a certain extent, so will the people who come down here. He talks about the different jobs – the scientists and techies, the doctor who works all night and is never up for breakfast, the meteorological observers who work shifts, record the weather every three hours and launch daily met balloons.

It makes me see my job as a scientist down here in a new light – as part of a long tradition. Gives it more purpose and reason somehow, something to be proud of. The tents are identical and so are the supplies boxes used on a field trip: tent box, pots box, personal box. We even have manfood boxes still, all the same size, all designed to fit on a sledge and laid out inside the tent according to the same tried and tested system. They even use the same stoves, lamps and pots and keep the snow on the same side of the tent for melting. I like it. It feels very familiar. I haven't been very interested in reading about past antarctic adentures until now because I wanted to form my own opinions first. But now that I'm here, it seems to me that in some ways not much has changed in the past 50 years and not much will change, however hard we try.

Posted by Rhian at 12:26 EST | Comments (5)

Cassis on Stone

I love New York Restaurant Week: just last week I had an absolutely stunning lunch at Aureole, with fantastic wines and great service, for a fraction of what such an experience would normally cost me. Unfortunately, NYRW has spoiled me somewhat: if a restaurant is offering a special deal, I now expect something special. And when things go wrong, I get angry.

Take, for instance, the latest attempt to bring some of NYRW's buzz to the Financial District. The Downtown Alliance, along with various downtown corporate and quasi-statal sponsors, has come up with something called the River to River Festival: lots of fun for all the family this summer, with everything happening south of Chambers. You should check out the website, especially if you live nearby: there's an enormous number of free events, some of them extremely appealing.

Downtown restaurants, of course, want in on the action as well, so they've copied NYRW's pricing and implemented something called Meals to Music (PDF here), running from July 9-23. There are 28 restaurants involved, and they will each serve you a $20 prix-fixe lunch or $30 prix-fixe dinner if you pay with your American Express card.

It seems quite impressive, until you realise that at some of the participating restaurants, like Seaport tourist traps Sequoia and Red, you'd be hard-pressed to spend $30 on the food at dinner at the best of times. Still, there are some pretty high-end restaurants on the list, like Battery Gardens (great views of the Statue of Liberty) and 14 Wall Street (great views of, well, pretty much everything).

I'd heard some good things about Cassis on Stone, another restaurant on the list, and decided to check it out. Better yet, its listing on the River to River website said that if I went on a Saturday, I'd get an even better deal:

Saturdays prix-fixe dinner for $22.50. Three courses, menus change weekly. Saturdays, from June 5 through August 30, 5–10pm.

We had guests in town, and the guests had friends, and in the end six of us ended up schlepping down to Stone Street to take advantage of this offer. But when we got there, not only was there no $22.50 prix-fixe in sight: there wasn't even the standard Meals to Music $30 prix-fixe, either. It was a la carte or nothing, we were informed in a none-too-friendly manner by our waiter. Oh, and this was the first Saturday that the restaurant had even been open this summer: if you'd turned up any time in June, say, for this special offer, you'd have found Cassis on Stone shuttered.

Eventually, after an extremely long absence, our waiter returned with good news – there was a $22.50 prix fixe, after all! Just order one of the two cheapest starters on the menu (normally $6.50), and one of the two cheapest mains (normally $16), and they'd charge us only $22.50 in total. Hell, they'd even throw in a sorbet for dessert.

Needless to say, the prospect of getting $22.50-worth of food for the special bargain price of just $22.50 excited me enormously, so I ordered a green salad and a chicken ravioli. The former was small and tasteless; the latter was stolid and gelatinous. Maybe it was something to do with the fact that service was painfully slow: despite the fact that only a handful tables – all outdoors – were occupied, our waiter was usually nowhere to be seen. It's conceivable that the ravioli was wonderful when it left the kitchen, and simply congealed on its long journey to my table. I doubt it, though: I think that the very idea of chicken ravioli is just fundamentally misconceived.

After the main courses were cleared away, there was a very long wait, and eventually our waiter appeared just long enough for us to ask him where the sorbets were. Another long wait, and they did eventually appear; some of them were even eaten. By this point, we basically just wanted to pay and leave; the total, between six of us, came to $330 including tax and an absurdly generous 16% tip. Not a hugely expensive dinner, to be sure, but none of us felt we'd got anywhere near our money's worth. The night before, I'd had a wonderful meal for two at Danube which cost more or less the same amount, and was one of the greatest dining experiences of my life. There's simply no way that three meals at Cassis on Stone could ever approach the fabulousness of just one at Danube.

Maybe that's an invidious comparison. But the broader point still stands: in an attempt to bring some kind of life to Wall Street at weekends and after dark, the restaurants there – Cassis on Stone, at least – are essentially engaging in false advertising and bait-and-switch promotional tactics. After all, if you turn up there at 8:00 on a Saturday night, there's not much in the way of local alternatives for you to go to once you're told that the special offers you went for don't exist.

More generally, I think it's worth taking all restaurant "special offers" with a large pinch of the salt which Cassis on Stone never even saw fit to provide on our table. If you know the restaurant and are taking part in NYRW specifically, you can get a genuine bargain. Otherwise, you're just as likely to get a rip-off masquerading as a promotion.

Posted by Felix at 0:24 EST | Comments (2)

How many people read Gawker?

Überblog Gawker is running a house ad between the fourth and fifth entries on its homepage. "SPONSORSHIP" it says:
"Gawker, part of the largest weblog media group, reaches over 600,000 media junkies each month."

This comes as something of a surprise to those of us who doubt that there are over 600,000 media junkies in the known universe. But there's no easy way of checking: unlike sister sites Wonkette and Defamer, Gawker doesn't have a Sitemeter button which makes its site stats public.

Today, however, Gawker publisher Nick Denton put a little graph up on his personal weblog, charting pageviews per month for all of the Gawker properties. Here it is:

If you're an ultranerd, you can download the graph, open it up in Photoshop, and look at it magnified so that all the juicy bits of data are a bit more obvious. Once you've done that, you can use Photoshop's measure tool to work out approximate pageviews per month for the most recent month, June. In order of popularity, we get:

Caveat: these are rough numbers, although they probably overstate the real ones: if you look at Wonkette's official stats, for instance, they show just under 2m pageviews in June. But they'll do as a rough guide, and from them we can certainly learn a fair amount.

1. The flagship Gawker property has actually seen a substantial decrease in pageviews month-on-month. This isn't a reversion-to-mean after a big spike, either: looking at the graph, it certainly seems as though people are getting a little bored with Gawker, and moving on to other things – maybe, even, other Gawker Media weblogs. With Gawker editor Choire Sicha being elevated to a broader Editorial Director role, is it time to juice up Gawker with fresh blood? After all, the flagship is meant to be the biggest and the best, and Gawker is now languishing in third place when it comes to size.

2. As suspected, Kinja is nowhere, barely registering on the graph. (It's that dark yellow band near the top.) Denton put an enormous amount of time, energy and money into Kinja, and at this point I think it's safe to say that it didn't work out.

3. Fleshbot is now clearly the single most popular Gawker site. Pace Jason Calacanis at the Apple Store event, does that make Nick Denton a pornographer? It's certainly something which I'm sure he doesn't stress overmuch during his media lunches at Lever House.

4. Gizmodo seems not to have been damaged at all by the defection of Pete Rojas to Engadget, and in general the brands are much stronger than the writers. Look at what happened to Gawker pageviews after Elizabeth Spiers left for New York magazine last year: they almost trebled, from about 0.8m in October to about 2.3m in November.

But back to the original question: can Gawker reasonably claim that it reaches 600,000 media junkies per month? I originally spent three convoluted paragraphs here turning pageviews into visits and visits into visitors, ending up with the conclusion that no, it couldn't. Then I found this page, which has all of Gawker's site stats. And I was right: Gawker had just 375,000 unique visitors in June.

Even more interesting, that's the lowest number of the year so far, if you don't include Februrary, which seems to be a very weird outlier. The record was set in May, with 589,000 unique visitors; June saw a nasty 36% plunge from May's numbers. But even if the ad copy was written before June's numbers were in, Gawker has never had more than 600,000 unique visitors in any given month. And at present rates, it looks as though it could be a very long time until it does.

Posted by Felix at 15:15 EST | Comments (23)

Trips out and mid-winter

I've been out and about lately and it feels good. Nothing as exotic or high speed as what you folk out there in the 'Real World' can do I admit, but a kilometre away from the base makes all the difference. Remind me in the future that you don't need to go far, or for long, to have a holiday.

The first trip out was on the Friday before mid-winter. There is an old caboose called Wonky just beyond the perimeter that is equipped with basics and beds. Frank and I went out there after scrub-out and before dinner, pulling our huge p-bags and two small backpacks, containing dinner and stories, on a pulk.

Caboose Like a caravan but on skis.
Perimeter The perimeter drum line around Halley base has a circumference of about 5km and rolls around 1km from the main building at any point. As a general rule, we stay within this boundary for our own safety but the CASLab and some containers are betyond its reach.
Basics Frozen butter, dried food, pots, pans, primus stoves and tilly lamps, sheepskins, candles and fuel.
Frank Doctor and good friend.
Scrub-out Fortnightly intensive cleaning of the base – everyone does something.
P-bag "Personal -bag". A massive bag containing thermarest, insulating foam mat, sheepskin rug, down sleeping bag, fleece sleeping bag liner and bivouac bag.
Pulk Small plastic or fibreglass sledge used for manhauling stuff around the place.

It was an absolutely stunning night. Clear to the horizon, no moon, stars so bright you could navigate by them. After dinner, we took two sheepskins out of the caboose, dug some seats in the snow on which to lay them and stared at the sky. Orion setting, Scorpio dancing, the old familiar faces, the southern cross. And shooters! So many shooting stars. A beautiful crystal clear night. After about 5 minutes my toes were numb and I had to go in to warm up.

The caboose is equipped with a slow oil-burning stove in addition to the lamps and primus which, once it got going, kept us toasty all night. The familiar smell of kerosene, slightly sweet, the tent-like banter, bedtime stories.

The next day I had to go the the lab to do daily checks and then most of the weekend was spent by people finishing up presents. Monday finally arrived, June 21st, mid-winter, the day we've been counting down to since the ship left. It was a great day. Breakfast in bed from the Base Commander, The Shining as a traditional morning movie, everyone gathering in the lounge around lunch- time, surrounded by decorations, a newly created fire-place and a christmas tree. Awaiting Santa. Ho Ho Ho! He's not that busy this time of year so he stayed for a while. Under the tree was one present for each person (a miracle of trust and memory, if you ask me!), made by a secret friend on base, often involving hours of unknown heartache behind workshop doors. No-one was dissapointed and I was reminded again what present-giving is supposed to be about. Intricate models from brass, carvings from wood, a fully functioning stove, an engraved knife, hand-developed photos, paintings, stories, picture frames and glossy photographs, games, plaques and stories. Each very personal, each unique and each made with love. Then the bubbly was popped, wine bottles opened and the festivities began! Christmas with none of the bad bits, none of the consumerism, an amazing meal, great stories, everyone dressed up to the nines. Celebrations into the night.

The next day I had to go to the lab to do daily checks. I didn't think I'd make it.

In honour of reaching mid-winter, all British bases have a week holiday at this time of year, but obviously everyone has a certain amount of maintenance work to do. It was a relaxed week, a fun week but very low key and I for one spent most of the time asleep.

On one of the evenings a group of us went to the igloo to read poetry and stories. I had my big fat book of native american tales and delved back into the world of Coyote and Iktome. Others brought poems and we passed the book around. After a couple of hours, folk were cold. It was, after all, approaching -40C outside and body warmth can heat you only so far. Another beautiful, starry starry night.

Kev (the chef) and I decided to stay the night in the igloo and had brought our p-bags just in case – in case we dared, that is. It was cold. The tilly was providing light but little heat and our sleeping bags needed unrolling, sorting out, mattresses blown up etc. Not easy with bear-paw mitts the size of your head on the end of each hand. Not easy in fits of giggles eaither. Kev first clambered into his sleeping bag, overalls and all, to warm up. I tried the more sensible approach of taking off atleast one layer of down in order to allow the bag to work its magic. But this involved getting cold first so, in retrospect, I wasn't much better off. Invariably, just when you've warmed up, your bladder decides it's time to make itself known. Out of the sleeping bag, back into boots (ooo so cold!), out the chute of the igloo, down the tunnel, up the entance that is now buried and has no steps, out, out, spat out into the glorious night sky. And then repeat. The only good thing about this whole charade is the amusement it provides your companion.

Eventually we settled down to try to sleep. All thermals, all liners, all zips zipped and toggles toggled, cosy cosy. Turn over in the middle of the night and BLAST a shot of icy cold air shivers right down to your toes. In the morning we tried to light the tilly but the meths wouldn't take. When it eventually did, we got a plume of smoke in our face. It was all comical and awkward, and cold. We just needed to get some light and warm up enough to get out of our sleeping bags and go home. But this involved putting on boots that had been sat at -45C all night. Still, it's a record I'm proud of. I came in, had a mug of horlicks and a hot shower and then went straight to my bed.

The week continued with celebrations and events. A murder mystery night, a barbeque, a fancy dress party. It was so cold for the barbeque that the wood had to be doused in petrol and the petrol lit with a soaked rag. Even on a red hot stove the meat barely cooked because of the icy air above and before not too long, people ended up inside again.

Then we went back to work for a week. It wasn't as bad as I had expected. The sun's coming back now. It's a shame – I like it dark, I like it in winter, this is my pace of life.

Last Friday, Simon and I went out to the caboose, this time equipped with bottles of plonk and ingredients for fish butties. The night was not clear. It was foggy foggy, no, misty. I can't explain it. The world has a mauve haze about it. The moon has returned now so there is light even if you can't see where you're going. It's a bit like, I imagine, being inside a mothball inside a freezer looking out. With a dim blue light on in the freezer. That's the best I can do. Isotropic. Every direction in a sphere around me looks the same. I can't see a thing. I can't see where my feet are going, where my body is headed, what's up, what's down, what's in front or behind. I quite like this haze too though, it's enveloping.

We found the caboose eventually but not without some difficulty. Inside, once again, was warm and welcoming – eventually, that is. I like it there so much that I've now left my sleeping bag out there. At the very least I intend to go out there for my birthday. We talked through the night like you do when you're students, or kids at a slumber party, and slept like babies late into the morning. The day that greeted us was stunning. The haze had gone completely, the moon was bright and there was a striking red glow from the horizon to the north. It was huge and red and so uplifting! It took us a while to sort ourselves out but by 3pm we were walking the long way home, past some old Roman Ruins and a cow called Cyril. It was like being a tourist in your home town. The sky, the light, the shapes in the snow revealed after days of wind and fog.

I didn't want to go in. But it was cold, so we did, at 5pm. And then I had to visit the lab to do my daily checks.

Posted by Rhian at 12:55 EST | Comments (6)

Before Sunset

I'm probably biased, but I've always considered Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise to be a film which is loved by those who have seen it, and hated by those who haven't. Linklater is one of the most interesting American directors working today, but Before Sunrise has always had difficulty being taken seriously. It's obvious why: its central conceit is incredibly corny, and Ethan Hawke has always been rather off-putting. I'm convinced, however, that the film is a minor masterpiece, a genuinely romantic film with so much intelligence and honesty that it transcends and reinvents its genre.

I was worried, then, I have to admit, when I saw the trailer for the sequel, Before Sunset. Mister Voiceover – you know him, the guy with the deep voice who does all those "in a world..." trailers – intones dreadful copy ("now, they have one afternoon to find out if they belong together") over a horribly obtrusive soundtrack. I was convinced that Linklater had sold out, delivering a schmaltzy piece of summer romantic fluff in the wake of his kid-friendly School of Rock.

I should have had more faith. After all, School of Rock was an excellent film itself, and Linklater is still at the stage of his career where he's much more likely to overreach than he is to phone it in. (I must wonder, however, how on earth he ended up allowing that trailer to go out.) It turns out that Before Sunset is just as wonderful as Before Sunrise was, and despite having a budget four times the size of the original, actually works within much greater limitations.

Before Sunset is, to all intents and purposes, a Dogme film. Look down the list of criteria in the famous vow of chastity, and, if you consider a Steadicam to be handheld and ignore the director's credit, Before Sunset fulfills all of them. Unlike the trailer, there is no soundtrack: the only music comes when Celine (Julie Delpy) sings a song, and when Jesse (Ethan Hawke) plays a CD on a home midi system.

In fact, Before Sunset imposes another genuinely onerous limitation upon itself: the entire film is shot in real time. The 80 minutes of the film correspond to 80 minutes in the lives of our protagonists, which means the whole dramatic arc has to play itself out over the course of one long conversation. And there really is a dramatic arc: this is not – or not only – a film of ideas, in the tradition of My Dinner With Andre. Real feelings get explored, and one scene, in the back of a limousine, is the equal, in emotional clout, of any Oscar-winning drama.

That said, Ethan Hawke is still rather off-putting. His annoying facial hair remains from the original movie, but in the intervening years he also seems to have picked up Tom Cruise's horrible, fake, please-kick-me-in-the-teeth grin. Frankly, he's an obnoxious arsehole. His opposite number, Julie Delpy, is not much more attractive herself: both actors wear decidedly unflattering clothing (although Hawke clearly spends far too much time on his hair), and a large part of the genius of the film is the way in which it touches us with the love that two people feel for each other, even when we can't really see what the attraction is in either of them.

There are weak points in the film, especially when Julie Delpy recounts the time she spent in New York. She talks about living "in the US", and recounts a story of a police officer telling her that she should go out and buy a gun – something which would simply never happen if, as she says, she was living on the corner of 11th Street and Broadway in downtown Manhattan. Similarly, she compares the "have a nice day" attitude of Americans to the more dour people she encounters in Paris – again, that's the sort of observation which rings true anywhere in America except New York City.

I was also not entirely taken with the ending, which I shan't give away here, but which felt far too clean and simplistic to me. In some ways, Before Sunset is much more romantic than Before Sunrise. Even as Celine and Jesse talk at length about their loss of innocence over the past nine years and the way in which they no longer aspire to or think in romantic clichés, the director seems to have moved in the opposite direction. The sequel doesn't have the wonderful bittersweet open-endedness of the original, nor does it leave open, as Before Sunrise did, the question of whether the two kids were ultimately deluding themselves if they thought that a highly artificial night in Vienna could bespeak eternal love.

Before Sunset does, on the other hand, have some great dialogue, filmed in endless virtuoso takes, and it shows us that most difficult of emotions to pin down on screen – love – with a tender yet unblinking eye. The real achievement of this film is in its asceticism, in its ability to give up not only the crutches which Dogme has already abandoned, but also give up the plot twists and complications which turn most love stories into fully-fledged movies. In one scene, Jesse watches Celine dance. And despite the fact that you don't really care about either of the characters, you can see that Jesse loves Celine, and loves the way she dances. And so, even though we might not think much of Jesse, or of Celine, or of Celine's dancing, we still care: about the emotion that connects them, and which is the raison d'être for this film and its predecessor. Linklater has gambled, successfully, twice, that love, alone, can make a movie.

Posted by Felix at 2:02 EST | Comments (7)

« June 2004 | Main | August 2004 »

Felix Salmon: Recent posts

Felix's del.icio.us links

Archives

Powered by Movable Type 3.2



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License