Gawker Drops Three Blogs From Its Crapfolio
By DavidReece • Apr 14th, 2008 • Category: Blogs, Business & Technology, NewsNew York based Gawker Media has sold three blogs from its impressively sized array of online publications, because Managing Editor, Nick Denton couldn’t care less about the subject matter, citing a failure to generate enough ad-revenue to make it worth the effort.
The three blogs being dropped are Gridskipper, Idolator and Wonkette, all of which are said to fail as ad-revenue generators compared to Gawker Media’s other sites, like the popular Valleywag and Gizmodo.
Gawker has sold urban travel blog, Gridskipper to Curbed, a blog network headed up by ex-Gawker editor, Lockhart Steele, Idolator has been snapped up by Buzznet, and Wonkette has gone to Ken Layne.
In an internal e-mail published by Gawker, Nick Denton had this to say…
“Why these three sites? To be blunt: they each had their editorial successes; but someone else will have better luck selling the advertising than we did…
…I’m relieved we’ve found pretty decent homes for the three sites, and most of their writers, but we’re gutted to lose them. Idolator’s Pop Critic’s Poll was a tremendous coup—and Patric’s bleeding-heart logo for the site was one of my favorites. Gridskipper is so far the most sophisticated travel blog: it entirely deserved its inclusion in Time’s list of the 50 coolest websites.”
Gawker’s annual ad-revenue was estimated to be over $2 Million in 2006, spread across 16 (now 13) blogs, each covering niche topics as diverse as technology, music and pornography, making the new-media company one of the most successful and widely-read blog publishers around.
Gawker owned tech gossip ‘rag’ Valleywag was recently under fire from founders of YCombinator’s own news aggregator after they debated banning the site’s articles for being nothing more that puerile link-bait with little or no substance, mirroring Valleywag’s growing reputation among readers for publishing baseless articles with no merit, which makes you wonder why ‘The Wag’ wasn’t dropped like a hot potato while they had the chance. I would hazard a guess based on readership alone, that it brings in a large enough portion of revenue to keep.
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“Crapfolio”? Ouch! Although I agree that Valleywag has never been my first port of call for tech news. The title always seems more interesting than the post itself. The only other Gawker site I read is Gizmodo, which is excellent. Not sure that would count as crap in my book.
I wonder how much they sold for? Gawker’s articles doesn’t say, but even the bottom 3 blogs must be worth a pretty penny.
@Mark, yep - Gizmodo is a decent blog, so is Consumerist. The rest is a mixed bag, but I guess as long as they make money they can pretty much do what they want. They’ve obviously built a very successful business from it, and anything else comes down to personal preference.
@Ade, absolutely no idea. They’re being pretty tight-lipped about it.