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:

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.

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]

Until then, here are two more conflicting data sets to chew on: A review of financial Web sites estimates that ad revenue will be down by as much as 30 percent for the first three months of 2009. But Gawker Media’s Nick Denton, who has forecast doom for the year and cut his blogging staff accordingly, says revenue is up 10 percent so far.

The good news first: Denton, who was forecasting a 40 percent drop in overall advertising spending last fall, says he’s pleasantly surprised to see good growth in videogame advertising and decent sales for entertainment advertising in the first few weeks of 2009.

He then rushes to point out that consumer electronic ads are weak (obviously), that ads his salesmen have booked so far could still get pulled, that his numbers are preliminary and that perhaps his 10-blog network (soon to be nine) may not be a good market proxy. Etc.

Duly noted. But I’m going to keep highlighting any glimmer of hope I can find at this point. In large part because of reports like the one I received today from Douglas A. McIntyre, the sharp and dour publisher behind financial site 24/7 Wall St.

McIntyre says he’s surveyed multiple financial sites, including portals like Yahoo’s, Microsoft’s (MSFT) MSN and Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL; big sites like CNN Money and Forbes.com; and “medium-sized” sites like his own. His conclusion: Overall ad revenue is down 15 percent to 30 percent this year.

Executive summary: There’s lots of interest in financial news, for obvious reasons. Traffic is up 15 to 25 percent at big sites, and up 35 percent to 50 percent at smaller sites, compared to last year. And page views have grown even more, since sites are getting savvier at keeping you around longer.

The problem: The amount advertisers are willing to pay is dropping–in part because there’s much more traffic, so there’s much greater supply of inventory.

At the big portals, McIntyre says, “many large advertisers are asking for 25 percent to 40 percent more impressions for the same budget that they spent in the same quarter as last year”… and that Google AdSense ads, the fallback position for many sites when they can’t sell space themselves, are worth 20 percent to 30 percent less. Overall, McIntyre says, “CPMs are down as much as 40 percent across the websites we reviewed when compared to the first quarter of last year.”

So there you go: Different data you can use to either forecast more doom or to explain that things may not be so terrible after all. The surprise is that the (relatively) sunny view would come from Nick “doom-mongering” Denton.

Denton wouldn’t comment on the sale of Consumerist, an advocacy site with attitude that he put on the block last month. And he would only confirm that Defamer, his attempt to break into Hollywood coverage, is for sale.

But I’m told that Consumerist may have fetched something in the “mid-six figure range,” and that a logical buyer for Defamer would be BuzzNet, the pop culture blog network that picked up Denton’s Idolator music site earlier this year.

When the Defamer sale is complete, Denton will have nine blogs left, down from a high of 15. He has also laid off staff, reduced compensation and is trying to force vendors to cut their fees–and generally followed most of the playbook he published this fall in his “doom-mongering” memo.

Last month, Denton boasted about record revenues. But he says that December sales are poor–as they have been across much of the Web world.

UPDATE: Here’s a comment from Nick, who objects to my use of the verb “shrink” in my first paragraph. He suggests “prune” as an alternative: “The six sites we’ve put up for sale or merged this year represent about a tenth of our total page views. Our core properties–Gizmodo, Gawker, Kotaku, Jezebel, Lifehacker, io9, Fleshbot, Jalopnik and Deadspin–make up for that in about two months of growth.” And he notes that Gawker Media pageviews are up 67 percent, to 259 million, in November, according to Quantcast.

Yes, this is the third post I’ve written today about Gawker Media’s Nick Denton, who seems to prefer to get all of his news out at the same time.

But briefly:

• Denton has put Consumerist, his, um, pro-consumer site, up for sale.
• Denton is folding Valleywag, his Gawker-for-techies site, into…Gawker. Editor Owen Thomas will keep his job, and essentially become Gawker’s man in Silicon Valley. Writer Paul Boutin will contribute some stories, but likely fewer.
• Denton has more moves to come. Conveniently, he has provided a playbook for them via his post this morning, in which he spells out what Internet publishers should do in the face of a cratering ad market. Educated guess: If you sell ads for Denton, or work for one of his most successful titles (Gawker, gadget site Gizmodo, videogame site Kotaku), there are decent odds you will get to continue doing so in the future. Everybody else, all bets are off. Then again, that’s the same position that all those with a job in media finds themselves in these days. Cheers!

Don’t care what what a man who publishes gossip blogs predicts will happen to the ad market? Fair enough.Here are some actual data from the front lines: Online advertising sales results from Jupiter Media (JUPM), an odd collection of Web sites, trade shows and (until last month), stock photography businesses.

To spell that out–Jupiter is reporting that revenue per online advertiser dropped 29.6 percent in the last quarter, which ended Sept. 30. And recall that the financial meltdown didn’t really hit until the last two weeks of September.

The net effect: Jupiter’s online media business declined 4.6 percent in that quarter. What do you think the current quarter will look like?

If you want to argue that Jupiter’s an outlier, and that big Web players like Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) are still going to be fine, you’re not alone. Yesterday, for instance, someone at Condé Nast’s Web publishing unit told me the company’s still forecasting high single-digit to low double-digit revenue increases for 2009.

But recall that Time Warner’s AOL (TWX) just recorded a six percent ad revenue drop during its third quarter. At some point Nick Denton is going to look less paranoid and more prescient.