Gawker spins off Wonkette and other blogs
David Johnson April 15th, 2008
Anticipating the slowing online ad market, Nick Denton’s Gawker Media is selling off three of its blogs. Music blog Idolator is being sold to the music community Buzznet and the urban travel guide Gridskipper is being taken over by the Curbed Network. Perhaps the biggest surprise though, is the sale of Wonkette, one of the first blogs in the Gawker stable and one of its best-performing properties. Wonkette’s managing editor Ken Layne will be taking over the site, which is joining the BlogAds network of political sites.
4 Comments Add your own
1. Aaron | April 15th, 2008 at 9:23 am
PBS’ MediaShift has an excellent column on the effect of Gawker’s pay-per-pageview compensation system. (Linked from my name above.) The gist of it: “Nick Denton is an old media dog dressed up in new media clothes.”
I suppose the net result of that system is Gizmodo’s now infamous CES prank.
2. Lurker | April 15th, 2008 at 10:27 am
I’ll say it over here because I feel realtively safe from repercussions, but I’m really kind of sad to see Wonkette go. Ever since Ken Layne took over, virtually every story, except for a few reader submissions have come from just a handful of sources and everything has been about the joke. As long as she was in the Gawker stable, then there’s always been the promise that someday the quality might actually return and the blog will be relevant again, but the spin-off appears to mean that it’ll forever be just another frat-boy hang-out with the depth of Leno’s monologue.
3. Joe - fourhman.com | April 15th, 2008 at 10:27 am
Not to mention encouraging commenters to flame each other. Every comment battle is another million reloads!
Kotaku (the Gawker gamer channel) recently hit the limit on this, as an article on racism and gaming inspired a legion of asshat commenters to attack the speaker. Since then, Kotaku editorial asked the community if they need to trim down the number of approved commenters in hopes of raising the level of discussion.
It will be interesting to see which path they choose… the million-moron-pageview path or the appeal-to-better-nature path.
4. brett | April 15th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
Ken Layne is and always has been a complete prick: yet another of the many reasons not to read wonkette any more. It has sucked ever since the departure of Anal Marie Cox.
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