Gawker Media is an American online media company and blog network, founded and owned by Nick Denton based in New York City. It is considered to be one of the most visible and successful blog-oriented media companies. As of March 2010, it is the parent company for 10 different weblogs, including Gawker.com, Fleshbot, Deadspin, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, io9, Kotaku, Jalopnik, Jezebel, Gawker.tv, and Cityfile. All Gawker articles are licensed on a Creative Commons attribution-NonCommercial license.
While Denton does not go into detail over Gawker Media's finances, he has downplayed the profit potential of blogs, declaring that "[b]logs are likely to be better for readers than for capitalists. While I love the medium, I've always been skeptical about the value of blogs as businesses," on his personal site.
However, in the February 20, 2006 issue of New York Magazine, Jossip founder David Hauslaib estimated Gawker.com's annual advertising revenue to be at least $1 million two years ago, and possibly over $2 million a year. Combined with low operating costs — mostly web hosting fees and writer salaries — Denton was already believed to be turning a healthy profit in 2006. In 2009, the corporation was estimated to be worth $300 million, with $60 million in advertising revenues and more than $30 million in operating profit.
On April 14, 2008, Gawker.com announced that Gawker Media had sold three sites: Idolator, Gridskipper, and Wonkette. Denton explained the sale by saying, in a memo, "they each had their editorial successes; but someone else will have better luck selling the advertising than we did."
In a fall 2008 memo Denton announced the layoff of "19 of our 133 editorial positions" at Valleywag, Consumerist, Fleshbot and other sites, and the hiring of 10 new employees for the most commercially successful sites, - Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker and Gawker - and others which were deemed to promise similar commercial success (Jezebel, io9, Deadspin and Jalopnik). Denton also announced the suspension of a bonus payment scheme based on pageviews by which Gawker had paid $50,000 a month on the average to its staff, citing a need to generate actual advertising revenue as opposed to just increasing traffic. He explained these decisions by referring to the 2008 credit crisis, but stated that the company was still profitable. In September 2008, Gawker reported 274 million pageviews.
On November 12, 2008, Gawker announced that Valleywag would fold into Gawker.com. The Consumerist was sold to Consumers Union, who took over the site on January 1, 2009.
On February 22, 2009, Gawker announced that Defamer would fold into Gawker.com.
In October 2009 Gawker Media websites were infected with malware in the form of fake Suzuki advertisements. The exploits infected unprotected users with spyware and crashed infected computer's browsers. The network apologized by simply stating "Sorry About That. Our ad sales team fell for a malware scam. Sorry if it crashed your computer." Gawker shared the correspondence between the scammers and Gawker via Business Insider.
On February 15, 2010, Gawker announced it had acquired CityFile, an online directory of celebrities and media personalities. In a post that day, Gawker's Editor-in-Chief Gabriel Snyder announced that he was being replaced by CityFile editor Remy Stern.
source:wikipedia
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