Gawker Media’s Nick Denton has announced the death of gambling blog Oddjack, which will cease to be at the end of the month.
Writes Denton:
“Blog titles are like new TV shows. Some make it; some don’t. Oddjack, Gawker Media’s gambling site, was one of the ones that didn’t. And it’s best to cancel the show sooner rather than later.”
The really strange thing is why wouldn’t Denton sell the blog if it wasn’t performing and let someone else make a go of it? But then again, as Denton told a certain friend of mine at a recent conference: we aren’t in the same game as him, given that we are not worthy perhaps it’s time for me to stop writing now :-)……
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I wouldn’t have sold it. Better to heap it into a grave than watch someone else make a fortune on it.
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I don’t think it is strange that he didn’t sell as I agree with the liberalcowboy from JOAB reasons but I do wonder why they couldn’t get traffic for it. Obviously there would not be a huge overlap of audience with Gawker’s uber blogs to capitalise/trade with but there is serious traffic available for sites that target people who partake in the enjoyable sin that is gambling. Maybe Gawker just isn’t great at marketing or that the sector had better competitors. If I was Nick I’d create a secondary low maintenance/seperate business model driven blog network ala Scrivs’s Fine Fools to push non-performing blogs into to find their feet because unlike TV shows which have to find an audience to fit in the TV networks limited time sensitive schedule we’ve got as long as we need to make something work on the net.
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If he sells it and It fails, he sells crappy investments. If he sells it and it succeeds, he can’t run the blog as well as “so-and-so.”