OK, that’s not exactly what the Gawker Media proprietor had to say, but close enough.  Along with crediting the recent “Miss Universe threeway” for a boost to the bottom line of Fleshbot, Nick Denton (above) is quick to hail Steve Phillips’ recent zipper issues (and A.J. Daulerio’s dramatic response) with boosting Deadspin’s traffic in a memo republished by Poynter.org :

From: Nick Denton
Subject: Nearly!
To: [email protected]
Date: Wednesday, December 2, 2009, 12:36 PM

Just a shade off 400m pageviews in November. Damn. Close. To put that in perspective, Los Angeles Times is somewhere between 100m and 200m. New York Times is about 1bn. In web traffic, we’re somewhere in between. Not bad for a bunch of scrappy bloggers!

io9 sucked those Twilight vampires dry. The scifi site continues to run at twice the traffic of this time last year. It’s now twice the size of Boing Boing, the closest competitor — a site which has been around since the beginning of the blogs. io9’s growth means that we now have not a single site under 20m pageviews a month. (The threshold of success used to be 1m!)

The ESPN controversy and other stories seem to have left Deadspin at a consistently higher level than the summer. It’s also doubled in traffic. If you needed any more evidence that scoops are rewarded, here it is. Deadspin has largely abandoned the blog filler. The site is down to 20 posts a day. But they’re damn good posts.