Gawker Media Opens Publishing Rights to… Anyone

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Gawker MediaIn what is probably his boldest move so far, Nick Denton, Gawker Media Guru, has opened the rights to publish on the Gawker media properties to everyone. Just like on any other blog, readers could send Gawker editors tips via a submission form or via email, but now tips send via the new submission form will be published immediately on the tag pages.

A small redesign across the board introduced the new submission form on all 9 Gawker blogs.

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User submissions will have to include a tag, using the Hashtag format, popularised on Twitter. Submissions with tags will then be published on the blogs’ appropriate tag pages. The new move is reminiscent of the once so popular community portals with forums and Denton appropriately called the new asset ‘Gawker Open Forums’.
From the internal memo sent to editors: [Read more…]

Gawker Media Averages More Than 1bn Page Views Yearly After 7 Years

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Gawker MediaToday Erin Pettigrew announced the total traffic Gawker Media has generated in little more than 7 years. Nick Denton announced the first Gawker blog, Gizmodo, on August 14th 2002, some weeks after Peter Rojas started the blog with 6 daily entries. Denton called it a low-risk experiment and wanted to know if someone could make a living from blogging.

I have no idea how much Gizmodo can bring in revenues. All I know is that weblogs are a compelling form, gadget addicts are all online, and Amazon.com’s API makes it easy to connect product with content.

Most importantly, this is a low-risk commercial experiment. Most media companies suffer from overblown editorial, an ad sales force with padded expense accounts, and overly complex publishing systems with a team of primadonna sysadmins to maintain it. By contrast, Gizmodo will be a couple of hours a day of Pete’s link-picking skills, some automatically generated Amazon.com links, and $150-worth of Movable Type. Media has never before been this lean. [Read more…]

Gawker Media Featured as Winner in AdAge Story

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The fact that Nick Denton’s Gawker Media is making a bundle despite the recession, filling its sites with heavyweight advertisers, is old news. That doesn’t stop Advertising Age to feature the blog network as something that is actually working. It gets a bit silly though:

Did Gawker Media just grow up? The little web publisher that big media loves to hate is now teaching them a thing or two about brand advertising. No belly-fat ads, ads with festering sores or diet-success stories; just big, splashy brand ads from HBO, Audi and Samsung.

I don’t exactly recall the Gawker Media brands being littered by Civony Adsense ads before everything went downhill in the advertising industry. But fine, yeah, there’s no doubt that the 45% revenue increase accounts for some sort of maturation. I’d like to put that to the fact that advertisers get the web and its strengths over old media channels better these days. After all, when you feel the pinch it is a good thing to be able to track everything in realtime.

Consumerist Brought Down Gawker Media

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Gawker Media has been struggling to serve their oh so necessary pageviews, and the culprit turned out to be none other than the Consumerist. The site is hosted by Gawker Media as part of the deal with the Consumers Union, who acquired it late last year. As the clever already deducted, the Consumerist site was attacked by hackers, which caused the technical difficulties. All sites are back up, although the Consumerist isn’t behaving perfectly well yet.

Gawker Hires Los Angeles Times Editor

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defamer.jpgMore Gawker Media news coming across the wire, err, feed reader. Simon Owen’s Bloggsam has published an internal memo from Gabriel Snyder regarding Gawker hiring a new West Coast Editor. From the memo:

Ever since Defamer was merged into Gawker earlier this year, I’ve been looking for the right person to hire in L.A., so I’m pleased to announce someone who was worth the wait: Richard Rushfield is joining Gawker as its new West Coast Editor. From his Venice bungalow he’ll proudly fly the Defamer flag as well as pitch in with charting the general editorial direction of the site.

Richard Rushfield is slated to start at Gawker on August 31st. He was previously the Entertainment Editor at Los Angeles Times, which should fit the Defamer part of Gawker perfectly. The Defamer brand was merged into the main Gawker site in February this year, after failing to sell it. Read the full memo at Bloggasm.