Our colleagues over at FishbowlNY mentioned that Gawker’s first half of 2009 was better than expected; in fact, the blog network’s done so well that publisher Nick Denton is re-instating pageview bonuses for his writers.

Denton wrote in a memo to staff:

Each writer on a site will have a (pretty demanding) individual pageview target. (Remember, individual pageviews are viewable at http://gawker.com/stats etc.) That target will be proportional to a writer’s base compensation. i.e. the more your monthly pay, the more people you’re expected to reach. If you go 10% over target, you get a 10% bump in pay. The target will rise as the traffic of the site as a whole increases. Your site’s editor-in-chief will be in touch to discuss the details later this week.

So we can’t quite calculate Hamilton Nolan‘s raise yet, but Nieman Journalism Lab, which broke the story, included Denton’s table of which blogs had gone over their overall targets. (Scroll all the way down to the bottom.) Deadspin, Gizmodo, and Jalopnik all failed to reach their targets for last month, meanwhile IO9 is crazy growing.