In the past week, Gawker Media, brought in approximately 9.1 million readers, overtaking Huffington Post's 8.7 million. Leading the charge was Deadspin, which received nearly 1 million unique readers last Monday following its report on the Brett Favre photo/voicemail scandal.

Site traffic this month had already been growing before the Favre scandal (now nearing 4 million visits) due to Deadspin's posting of a PowerPoint file from a female Duke University student detailing sexual encounters with several athletes at the school. Deadspin's newsletter subscriber base increased by 19% while Deadspin also became one of the top five hottest Google searches of the week. Deadspin's reporting of the football star's possible misconduct not only lifted Gawker Media in traffic standings, but also resulted in the National Football League launching an investigation of the former Jet's quarterback. This has forced other mainstream news outlets "hoping to ignore or marginalize the story" to report on Favre.