If anything, I’m struck that the article you linked could well be what “Abramson” read (and misunderstood) to create the paragraph in question, as the article refers to CPM and uses a novel derivative of the “Cost Per n” metric to analyze the traffic rubrics then in play at Gawker.
Let’s compare Denton’s Ratio to the numbers generated by another money-for-audience scheme in use on the Internet: online advertising. After all, lots of ads are sold using roughly the same language Denton uses: the M in CPM stands for thousand. Except it’s cost per thousand impressions (a.k.a. pageviews), not cost per thousand new visitors , which would be much more valuable. What Denton’s talking about is more like CPC — cost per click , which sells at a much higher rate. (Those new visitors aren’t just looking at an ad for a story; they’re actually reading it, or at least on the web page.) Except it’s even more valuable than that, since there’s no guarantee that the person clicking a CPC ad is actually a “new” visitor. Let’s call what Denton’s talking about CPMNV: cost per thousand new visitors.
