The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman

Deadline.com’s Nikki Finke and The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman have not been all that shy about feuding in public.  Finke must’ve been miffed that Waxman more or less got the Comcast/NBC Uni story correct since  Finke initially called out Waxman for having it wrong.  The burning question now is if and when the deal gets done whether Waxman will bust out a big fat TOLDJA! headline.

Finke rapped the well-funded Wrap’s relatively small web traffic.   Indeed, trying to cash in on web traffic is a dicey proposition these days.  The Wrap would likely have a hard time paying its bills  even if it increased its normal traffic by more than an order of magnitude.

But I wouldn’t write Waxman or The Wrap off  yet either.  Web publishing might be pretty iffy, but if The Wrap can figure out a way to make money off of conferences, who knows?  Conferences are where the money is! Unfortunately I am not a big fan of even attending conferences, and though Bill doesn’t loathe attending them, I don’t think he has any interest in trying to run one.

Anyway, we regularly look at the Quantcast data for sites that directly measure like The Wrap, and Deadline.com.

I was looking at the numbers for The Wrap, and they had a big spike on Tuesday!  Perhaps not quite a TOLDJA! moment for The Wrap, but it had to bring them some joy nonetheless:

Apparently it was this story about Crash director Paul Haggis’ public break with The Church of Scientology over gay rights.    I could be wrong about the cause of the traffic spike, but our experience is when you say a spike like that, it’s almost always related to only one post.

Spikes like that are always nice when you get them,  most sites don’t get them every day.

Conferences.  Definitely conferences.

But for a day at least,  The Wrap nearly doubled Deadline Hollywood’s traffic.  And I’m sure Nikki would say something like “I’m only one person, they have STAFF, they should be doing five times my traffic, every day!”

I’d tell you that I thought The Wrap had a better shot with conferences than Finke has, and as a series of conferences, luncheons, special series and other events, I do think that.  But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think a TOLDJA! conference  once a year had nice prospects for packing  ‘em in.   Around Halloween seems like a good time of year, too.  There are already special masks available!