Now that Bill Gates isn’t running Microsoft day to day, he is primarily focused on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is tackling big hairy problems like malaria. But apparently he still has enough time to moonlight as a blogger.

Check out Gawker Media’s Gizmodo, which features a post penned by Gates reminiscing about Microsoft (MSFT) in the good old days, way back in 1979 (the photo below is actually from 1978). Apparently, Gates submitted the 490-word item without prompting from the Gizmodo guys; I’m trying to find out if Gawker owner Nick Denton will be cutting Gates a check.

Denton disclosed his new policy, which isn’t really a new policy but a revival of an old policy, in an interview yesterday with Nieman Journalism Lab. He’s tried this a couple of times before: Last year he experimented with paying readers $7.50 for every 1,000 page views they generated via submissions. And in 2007, he offered a bounty of $10,000 for anyone who could land an “unretouched” version of an image that ended up on the cover of a women’s magazine, and paid out for this shot of Faith Hill.

I followed up with Denton this morning and he told me that he hasn’t fleshed out his plans yet–they’re “half-baked” right now–but they’re likely to be of the Faith Hill variety: Payouts to winner of contests, sweepstakes, etc.

Paying for tips, interviews and exclusives is standard practice outside of the U.S. The U.K.’s Daily Telegraph, for instance, paid a source that helped it break the expense account scandal that’s been roiling that country’s Parliament.

But it’s supposed to be verboten for “respectable” American media, though that self-imposed standard has been eroding for some time. It’s increasingly common, for instance, for TV news operations to pay big “licensing fees” to sought-after interview subjects, purportedly for access to family photos and videos.

Paying for tips is also old hat for newspaper tabloids. And TMZ, Time Warner’s (TWX) gossip powerhouse, has made it well-known that it will pay for tips. It’s a very good bet that the Web site has been writing many checks during the past couple weeks of the Michael Jackson frenzy.

Ultimately, Denton says, he’d like emulate the TMZ model. “I’d love to have their reputation–as the place you go if you want to make a buck.” Dream big!

TMZ boss Harvey Levin talks about his pay-per-tip policy in this interview with Kara Swisher:

The site is the work of Peter Rojas, who helped build Gizmodo and Engadget, and Ryan Block, who took the torch from Rojas after he moved on. Gizmodo and Engadget are the best known and most powerful of the new generation of gadget sites, which makes Rojas and Block revered by the gadget gang. That’s why we’ve been hearing about gdgt, in dribs and drabs, for many many months.

But as well known as Rojas and Block are, they’re still going to have to work hard to make a dent in the crowded field. In addition to the two blogs they created, the gadget spectrum includes everyone from staid players like CBS’s (CBS) CNET to rumor sites for Apple (APPL) obsessives, like MacRumors, to sites for real obsessives, like the handful of people who still own Palm (PALM) Treos. (And, of course, there’s All Things Digital’s Walt Mossberg, who bestrides all of this like the colossus he is, and is also my boss. Hi, Walt!)

Rojas and Block argue that their site is different because it’s not going to be driven by editors but by the site’s users, who will gather there to swap info, stories, rumors, opinions, etc. In other words, Facebook for gadgets, though I gather they’d recoil if they heard that. The other pitch, though they won’t spell this out, either: Their site takes a bunch of features and content that you can find other places and presents them in a better way.

There’s a bunch of nifty features, like a gadget-finder that lets you find products via specs instead of brands, and the site seems to be pretty slick. But it’s better if you have a look yourself instead of having me describe it. And gdgt.com won’t really hit its stride until actual users start using it. I look forward to hearing what they have to say about my upcoming phone dilemma: iPhone 3GS, Palm Pre or Blackberry Tour?

But as much as Rojas and Block argue that this is a community site, it’s their names and reps that have people interested in the project. And that’s what has convinced investors to plow money into an ad-supported Web site in an era when the economy sucks and there are way too many ad-supported Web sites.

The duo won’t discuss funding, but I’m told that last fall they were discussing investments of up to $1 million, but ended up taking less than that via a group of VCs and angel investors. I don’t have a complete list of investors, but people familiar with the company tell me that early-stage investor True Ventures led the round, which also included New York-based incubator Betaworks and Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis.

Calacanis’s name will resonate with longtime followers of the tech blog world: He was one of the founders of Weblogs Inc., which created Engadget as a rival to Gawker Media’s Gizmodo, and hired Rojas away from Gizmodo. Calacanis eventually sold Weblogs Inc. to Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL for a decent pile of cash, some of which I believe ended up in Rojas’s lap.

Click the image below to see a screenshot of what gdgt’s homepage ought to look like.

The Nikki Finke auction is over, and the winner is…Mail.com. Jay Penske’s Mail.com Media Corporation, which owns the Mail.com email service and a small portfolio of Web sites, has acquired the blogger, whose Deadline Hollywood Daily is a must-read for Hollywood.

No details on pricing yet.* But, the fate of Finke’s site, which was managed by the LA Weekly, has been the subject of lots of speculation in recent months, including spirited back-and-forths between Finke and competitors like Variety and Sharon Waxman’s The Wrap.

Reading that stuff has been nearly as entertaining as Finke’s column. She provides blow-by-blow Tinseltown coverage–she seemed to post nearly hourly during the 2007-2008 writer’s strike–and relishes her scoops. One of her most recent: Allegations that GE’s (GE) NBC Universal was trying to “stifle” the Hollywood Reporter’s coverage of the entertainment conglomerate and its parent company.

Finke says she’ll keep full editorial and design control as she begins working for Penske, the son of auto magnate Roger Penske. He’s making an interesting move: Mail.com is a white-label email provider that raised $35 million last year, but he’s been expanding into the content business. Earlier this year, he relaunched Movieline with staff from Gawker Media’s Defamer site.

But Finke’s site will remain separate from the rest of Penske’s portfolio. She says she’ll expand her one-woman show by hiring a “senior” journalist based in New York City within the next three months.

That will be a tricky expansion to navigate: Recent history shows that blogs produced by dedicated/obsessive proprietors often stumble when they expand, in part because dedicated/obsessive proprietors may not be the best managers and in part because it’s tough to find people who want, or are able, to work for dedicated/obsessive proprietors.

And from my perch, this seems like a lousy time to sell an ad-supported news site. Not so, says Finke. Or at least, not her site.

“I was not anxious to sell. I was not looking to sell,” she says. “This was sort of a process where various people kind of wore me down….I’m very pleased with what happened. What wound up happening was nothing like the offers I was getting a year ago.”

UPDATE: You can now pick a number, depending on which news source you like, but they range from “low seven figures” to $15 million. It would be awesome if any of them are true–I need a bigger apartment, among other things, and it’d be great to know that you can get rich blogging–but the only one I think is remotely plausible is the lowest one, from Rafat Ali at PaidContent.

Gabe Snyder at Gawker does a nice job of running through the estimates and explaining why they don’t make sense.

The only thing I’d add is that all of the numbers being floated today are almost certain to include earnout clauses, meaning the deal is potentially worth up to X amount–if Finke’s site hits certain performance goals. Which is a lot different than saying she’s actually made X amount in the deal.

Another way of putting it, from a source who buys and sells media assets for a living: “Presumably it’s one of these billion dollar earnout deals. I’ll pay you a billion dollars–one dollar (more or less) upfront, and the rest as a percentage of revenues (or profits if I ever find someone else to sell this to). But in the meantime you can tell your friends that you were paid a billion.”

UPDATE2: Now the WSJ estimates the deal at $10 million — but says that number includes equity from Mail.com, along with a $1 million upfront payment.

No, not really.

While an earlier version of the story went on to include a graph depicting BloodCopy’s Web traffic and several theories that might explain Gawker Media’s purchase of a vampire-themed blog, the Alley Insider post has since been revised. It now explains that the news site was snookered by a “PR firm contracted by Gawker [that] sent us a release with the news.”

Said news is actually part of a promotional campaign for “True Blood,” the vampire show entering its second season on Time Warner’s (TWX) HBO .

More details about BloodCopy, the fake blog that HBO runs to promote the show, as well as other marketing stunts the cable network has rolled out, are available here. But if you don’t have time to read a whole blog post, do be aware that this anti-vampire rights group is a fake. So is this pro-vampire rights group. And so is this synthetic blood beverage.

Disclosures! I used to work for Alley Insider, whose parent company just raised a bunch of money, which makes me happy.

But while Hearst isn’t ready to declare victory, it does say that the first two months of seattlepi.com’s life have been “encouraging.” Via a press release, Hearst offers up a bevy of traffic stats that show the site has grown even as its staff has shrunk. Hearst doesn’t offer up any info about revenue, but does say that its “sales and marketing team is highly energized.”

I sincerely hope so, and I sincerely hope it works. I still don’t get the math: Hearst says seattlepi.com is attracting 4.3 million monthly unique visitors. Chris Batty, who runs sales for Nick Denton’s Gawker Media empire, figures that traffic could support a staff of perhaps a dozen editorial workers at one of his sites–not the 20 or so that Hearst has working in editorial.

And bear in mind that Gawker’s titles have a national focus, not a regional one, which makes it much easier to sell than Seattlepi.com.  There may be a thriving business for regional/local online ads one day, and we’ve been hearing about the potential for many years. But it’s not there yet, and it’s not close.

Still, better to have Hearst says it’s encouraged than to have Hearst pull the plug after a few days.

Two months after becoming the nation’s largest newspaper to move to an all-digital news model, seattlepi.com’s year over year numbers show that it has more users this April than last April, when the Post Intelligencer was still publishing with an 80% larger staff, an amazing feat for an online venture with a newsroom of 20.

In April, its first full month of operation, seattlepi.com had 4.3 million unique visitors, up 1.6% from 4.2 million in April 2008 (source: Omniture). Total page views for the month were 37.3 million.

During the last week of April, the site broke its one-day unique user record since going online-only. There were 324,000 unique visitors on April 30—the 4th highest day in terms of unique visitors in 2009—breaking previous records set since going online only on April 29 (290,000) and April 27 (283,000). Total page views for those days were 1.5 million, 1.4 million and 1.5 million, respectively.

Two months into our online-only experiment, we are encouraged by this growth in visitors and expect our numbers to improve as we continue to establish new partnerships.

We get a lot of feedback from readers cheering us on and thanking us for continuing to bring them the local news and information they want and need. It’s great to see that not only have we not lost readers, we’ve actually gained new ones.

A new team of more than a dozen sales and marketing representatives and managers has been tasked with building advertising and marketing partnerships and creating a unique Seattle digital advertising agency.

Our sales and marketing team is highly energized to be working with such a vital and dynamic product. We will leverage existing partnerships with Yahoo!, Kaango, Metrix4Media, and others to create what is essentially a local digital advertising agency offering unique opportunities for business in the Seattle area and across the country. Advertisers and other partners understand that seattlepi.com is in an unrivaled, popular destination for news and information, offering tremendous value for exposing their products, services and brands to a large and very desirable audience.

Not the veterans of Denton’s Defamer, the showbiz site he rolled into his Gawker flagship in February. The three men–Seth Abramovitch, Kyle Buchanan and S.T. VanAirsdale–are essentially reconstituting their old site, using the name and Web address of an even older site, Movieline.com.

For more on the history of the original Movieline magazine, which started in 1989 and survived for a couple of years following the end of Bubble 1.0, see Abramovitch’s welcome post.

For more on the impetus to start up an entertainment blog in a market that’s struggling to  support the existing ones, we’ll have to talk to Jay Penske. Penske, the son of auto magnate Roger Penske, is relaunching Movieline as part of Mail.com, the white-label email provider that raised $35 million last year and has plans to get into the content business.

No, I don’t get it, either. So until we get a chance to sit down with Penske, let’s conclude with a quote from Abramovitch, who is as optimistic as one should be when launching a blog: “I  just think it’s a viable thing,” he says. “If you have smart writing about pop culture, people will come to you.”

That’s the lesson you can learn by perusing 24/7 Wall St.’s list of the 25 most valuable blogs and comparing it to the version the two-man publication put together a year ago. Editor Douglas A. MacIntyre has given sharp haircuts to many of the Web publications he assessed last March. But not all of them.

MacIntyre thinks TechCrunch, for instance, is now worth about $25 million; last year he pegged the tech blog’s value at $36 million. Web 2.0 chronicler Mashable has taken a 75 percent drop, from $10 million to $2.5 million.

But MacIntyre also thinks that the uber-aggregator Huffington Post is now worth $90 million, up from $70 million a year ago, even though the site’s political coverage doesn’t have the same appeal it had last fall. And he thinks the most valuable company on his list, Nick Denton’s Gawker Media, is now worth $170 million even though (or perhaps because) Denton has been consolidating his list of titles. Last spring, MacIntyre thought Gawker was worth $150 million.

Since every one of these blogs is a small operation that provides little to no visibility into its financials, every one of these valuations is, at best, an educated guess. And it’s easy to pick nits or arguments with any one of MacIntyre’s valuations. But then again, those arguments are sort of the point of a list like this.

And it’s hard to argue with his overall thesis: The same advertising woes that have caused problems for Yahoo (YHOO), the New York Times and nearly every other big media company are being felt by the little guys too. Maybe even more so since many of the little guys were hoping that the big guys would snap them up, as Condé Nast did with Ars Technica and the Guardian Media Group did with PaidContent last year. Hard to argue that we’ll see deals like these in 2009.

Here’s MacIntyre’s top 10: You can see the full list here.

1.  Gawker Media: $170 million. Last year: $150 million.

2.  Huffington Post: $90 million. Last year: $70 million.

3.  The Drudge Report: $48 million. Last year: $10 million.

4.  Perez Hilton: $32 million. Last year: $48 million.

5.  Sugar, Inc.: $27 million. Last year: Not listed.

6.  TechCrunch. $25 million. Last year: $36 million.

7.  MacRumors. $21 million. Last year: $85 million

8.  SeekingAlpha. $11 million. Last year: $15 million

9.  GigaOm: $9.5 million. Last year: $8.4 million

10. Politico: $8.7 million. Last year: Not listed.

This is the second time Denton has folded up one of his sites and tucked it into his Gawker flagship–last fall he did the same thing with Valleywag, his Silicon Valley gossip title.

Given that Denton had previously put Defamer up for sale, it’s not a stretch to conclude that there wasn’t a ravenous appetite for a standalone Hollywood gossip site with decent if declining traffic (Quantcast puts Defamer’s monthly unique visitors at one million. I had previously looked at Gawker Media’s own stat page and concluded that February traffic was down from a year ago, but Denton points out that February isn’t over yet–which means that this week’s Oscar traffic should boost those numbers a bit).

Denton’s spin: “Ultimately, the brand was worth more to us–as a section of the Gawker site.” Gawker Media is now down to nine sites, from a high of 15.

The big picture: Web publishers are increasingly trying to aggregate eyeballs at fewer sites, in order to cater to marketers who want to buy one title instead of spreading their dollars around at smaller pubs.

Denton’s post explaining the move is here. Money quote: “Fortunately, the three Defamer writers have decent employment prospects even amid the great media die-off–a testament to their talents.”

And here’s the take from one of the writers, Seth Abramovitch, who’s still working at the site for a week. Abramovitch and his soon-to-be former co-workers will be liveblogging the Oscars tonight.

Evidence: This eye-popping traffic chart, created by the smart fellows at Nieman Journalism Lab, using data from Nielsen Online, via Editor & Publisher (and yes, if you’re counting–this is the third time this info has been repurposed).

Boilerplate caveats: Nielsen data are different than internal logs, Nielsen data are different than comScore, Gawker Media has a bigger audience than the Los Angeles Times, etc., etc.

Big picture: No other daily newspaper that employs actual journalists to write real news stories comes close to the Times online. This includes my employers at News Corp. (NWS), who are making a concerted effort to position The Wall Street Journal as a Times competitor for general interest readers. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones, which owns the Journal and this Web site.)

As always, this distinction won’t do much for the Times if paper can’t afford to stay in business. But it’s worth noting that in a world where all of us are supposedly creating our own news aggregators and building our own microsites full of news that appeals only to us, more and more of us end up visiting the paper of record. Surely that’s worth something, no?

First, some data points:

• Gawker Media’s Nick Denton reports a big traffic spike at his sites in January–298 million page views, a 30 percent year-over-year increase. That’s even though one of his biggest annual eyeball attractors–Steve Jobs at MacWorld–never materialized.
• Blip.tv CEO Mike Hudack tells me that uploads to his Web video network have increased 50 percent so far this year.
• Now News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace, citing comScore numbers, notes that its U.S. traffic shot up last month as well: Unique visitors were up 10 percent, which is worth noting for a (relatively) old social network, and those folks spent 30 percent more time on the site than they did a year ago. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones, which owns this Web site.)
• Obligatory Twitter traffic stat: 2.6 million uniques in January, up 1,362 percent over the last year.
• ComScore’s (SCOR) overall numbers for Web usage for the last month: Uniques up 4.1 percent, page views up 3.1 percent, time spent per visitor up 2.5 percent.

Is any of this meaningful? Hard to say: Any single site can argue that it has done something to generate more visits and engagement from its users: MySpace has its MySpace Music site, Twitter is the buzziest start-up of the last 12 months, etc.

And last month also happened to feature Barack Obama’s inauguration, which was a huge Web traffic driver.

Still… there aren’t that many more Americans who are getting online for the first time at this point. Isn’t it reasonable to assume that a wide variety of sites is posting big traffic gains because many of us are now unemployed or underemployed? And that we’ve got more a lot of downtime to surf and click?

Alas, all those eyeballs aren’t translating to dollars for many of these publishers: Just ask Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL, which saw page views increase 69 percent during the last three months of 2008, but saw ad revenue drop 18 percent.

But I digress. If for some reason you do find yourself with more time on your hands, might I suggest this trio of themed YouTube videos? Enjoy. And good luck.

[Image Credit: Daquella Manera]