Blog network Gawker Media apparently had a great February, up as much as a fifth from last year, according to a leaked email from Nick Denton to the staff. Denton naturally doesn’t want to get overly optimistic, especially since he’s made so many changes the last few months to his network.

February 2009 wasn’t nearly as dreadful as it could have been. A lot of sites struck traffic records — including io9, Gawker, Deadspin, Jalopnik and Jezebel. In total, we drew 297m pageviews — some 34% over last February’s level and 50% up if you account for the sites we spun off in the meantime. Comments — so much improved in the last year — grew even more rapidly. Now that Defamer has been consolidated under Gawker, we don’t have a single weak site.

It seems like niche is king in these days of economic turmoil.