Gawker, Now Paying $6000 Per Post

Alright, so that title may be a little misleading. We all know Gawker (and every blog network today) is far too cheap to pay any writer this well. However with Gawker's pay per views arrangement this is exactly what happened last week.You see Gawker pays $5 for ever 1000 views a post generates, previously they paid as much as $7.50 for every 1000 views. A unique and smart strategy that encourges writers help to drive traffic to the Gawker properties. The end result is higher quality content and some Gawker writers sending me IMs me for Digg votes and other social media whoring.When Richard Lawson blogged the now infamous Montauk Monster post it generated over 1.2 million views. Even with the recent pay cuts, that post alone is worth roughly $6000.  One has to wonder, is Lawson one of the highest paid independent bloggers out there today? Prior to this he was already getting about $9000 per month from Gawker (estimated).One also can't help but wonder how much its going to pain Denton to write a check for this. I'd love to know, just how well does a dead dog carcass monetize? I'm thinking, not very well...