About ten days ago, gossip blog Gawker and its sister sites Gizmodo , Lifehacker and others switched over to a drastic redesign which was met with plenty of jeers . People always complain about design changes, but this time it looks like several of Gawker's sites actually took a major hit to traffic. According to Quantcast , which directly measures the sites, Gawker's U.S. daily unique visitors were cut in half from a high of 561,000 to 257,000 (see chart above). Gizmodo dropped from 746,000 to 420,000 in the U.S. Sitemeter shows an even more harrowing freefall for Gizmodo (see chart at right). Jezebel and Deadspin also took hits. Only Lifehacker seems to be holding steady.