Gunfight at Gawker Media Corral
Last week, Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker Media, a mini-empire of blogs, made some announcements which shocked the blogosphere. He decided to sell two of his fifteen sites, to reorganize others and to fire some editors. Even the New York Times took notice in “A Blog Mogul Turns Bearish on Blogs.” Now that the dust has fallen, it’s time to realize that blogs are just another publishing medium. And like other medias, they have to listen to the market — the readers. But read more…
Before going further, Nick Denton is the man who founded very well-known blogs such as Gawker, Wonkette or Gizmodo. But some of his other properties were not performing as he wished.
Let’s turn the New York Times article for some details.
As of last Friday, Sploid, a tabloid-infested site built on screen shots, and Screenhead, an aggregator of video clips, were put up for sale. Editors at Gawker, Wonkette, Gizmodo, and Gridskipper were moved or replaced. At a time when mainstream media companies are madly baking their own piece of blog pie, Mr. Denton was summarily executing underperformers.
“We are becoming a lot more like a traditional media company,” Mr. Denton said last week. “You launch a site, you have great hopes for it and it does not grow as much as you wanted. You have to have the discipline to recognize what isn’t working and put your money and efforts into those sites that are.”
As you can guess, this kind of article drew many comments, interesting or not. Here are a couple of sources you might want to read. The first one is from Donna Bogatin, a fellow blogger at ZDNet, “The business of blogging vs. the hype of blogging” who wrote that “Denton is a straight-forward, professional take on the need to adapt to the ever changing blogging business.” And here is one of the business reasons who led Denton to rationalize his blogging business.
Operational costs are increasing. For editorial talent, we now pay within the range of mainstream media. Technology expenses are growing even faster. The open-source publishing systems, upon which most weblogs depend, cannot handle larger and more sophisticated sites. The expansion of internet media is inflating costs for services such as ad-serving…
Now, it’s time to look at a comment about the New York Times article itself. This one comes from the Good Morning Silicon Valley blog, “Grouchy, maybe; bearish, no.”
Would you call Denton bearish on blogs, specifically for-profit publications? Nah. Gawker’s part of the blogosphere is now more like the magazine biz with a touch of TV, but without the barrier of huge entry costs, and that means cutting titles and shuffling lineups are likely to be regular occurences and fairly brutal. And bulls can be brutal, too.
In a way, Denton concurs. Here is the last line from the New York Times article: “The barrier to entry in Internet media is low,” he said. “The barrier to success is high.”
So have blogs become mature enough to enter the mainstream media world where reorganizations are considered as normal? Please tell me what you think.
Source: David Carr, The New York Times, July 3, 2006 (Free registration, permanent link); and other web sites
