I was never a daily visitor to Gawker or Gizmodo, but I used to end up there fairly frequently via links. What I've noticed over the past few months is that they seem to have dropped entirely out of the online social media "conversation" - you don't see people linking to them, you don't see people twittering their articles, etc. I don't have any technical explanation for that, but maybe the redesign was especially off-putting to heavy blog readers most likely to reblog/retweet things?