Goodbye CPMs. Even if Gawker’s new approach falls flat, I admire the boldness of their thinking:

To break out of the current painful loop, Denton has decided to emulate his beloved television and move to “a programming grid which owes more to TV than to magazines.” Gawker Media has a rudimentary calendar for its current sites, but that will become vastly more sophisticated post relaunch: he envisages saving up a few personal-finance posts at Lifehacker, say, putting them all up at 3pm on a Friday with the best one sitting on the front page for an hour, and then selling every ad on the site to Visa for that hour. At that point, if all goes according to plan, Gawker’s no longer competing with lots of other personal-finance sites for Visa’s ad dollars; instead, Visa is competing with other financial advertisers for the right to buy that hour.

This is something it’s hard for old-school web or print publishers to get their head around: the idea of selling time, rather than space. But it’s not entirely new to the web: Fortune, for instance, will quite happily sell against the spike in traffic that it knows will come on the day it puts up the Fortune 500. Advertisers, too, are very comfortable with the idea, since they’ve been buying time on TV and radio stations for decades. If I’m browsing Lifehacker during the personal finance hour, I might see what Denton calls “a storyboard of advertising,” a sequence of ads which work over a relatively short space of time. It’s an intriguing idea, and it’ll be very interesting to see how and whether Batty’s successor can sell it to notoriously-conservative media buyers.