A person who walks a lot and talks a lot like Wonkette publisher Nick Denton today weighed in on a Portfolio item about the Huffington Post apparently turning a profit (despite not paying a vast majority of its bloggers, we might add):

First off, if you look at the Nielson numbers, her traffic has been falling off during the past few months. (And if you look at the alexa numbers, it’s clear the site peaked about a year ago, and has seen a slow but steady erosion of it’s audience.) Second - and here’s the really key thing: According to Nielson, she has 1.4 million unique visitors a month. This number is always suspect, on all web sites, as it doesn’t take into account people who clear out their web cache and cookies every night - which means that one person visiting 20 times can be counted as 20 unique viewers.Moreover, remember this: 10,000 people, clicking 5 times a day is 50,000 hits a day, or 350,000 hits a week, or 1.4 million hits a month. In other words, a very small number of people quickly adds up to what appears to be a large audience, but isn’t.

Denton always likes to talk about how well his Gawker blog network is doing, so that’s why, we assume, he chimed in. However! Another commenter added an embarrassing little data point after Denton’s missive. “NickD, if you’re the NickD whom I think you are, can you elaborate on your own site’s traffic?” asked the commenter. “How does it compare to HuffPo’s, and portfolio.com’s for that matter? I’ve heard mixed reports.” And then the commenter linked to this nifty little chart:

Looks like all of Gawker’s griping about portfolio.com’s numbers is a bunch of hogwash.