Can we just say it? Julia has the buzz and attention these second-tier bloggers and video makers have dreamt of for years, and they can't stand it. Maybe you guys need to wipe off that mirror on your laps and take a good hard look. Over here, we're nothing but grateful for her success — Wired's Allison story, sure to be read by hundreds of thousands of our kind of people, namechecks Valleywag five times. (Photo by Brian Solis)

In a word, yes. I instant-messaged Denton — that's the only way he communicates, really — asking him to elaborate, and he replied: "Oh, just because he's got such a nauseatingly successful track record."

A British-born Financial Times beat reporter sent to cover Silicon Valley during the dotcom boom, Denton reinvented himself as a technology entrepreneur. He sold a dotcom events business, First Tuesday, in a luckily timed deal as the bubble was bursting. He briefly entangled himself in an online newsfeeds venture called iSyndicate before starting a direct competitor, Moreover (that's "more OH ver," you Yanks.) But he quit as CEO years before VeriSign bought the company. He's the first to admit that his success is more from good timing than hard work.

Denton's clearly wealthy. He owns a fancy loft in New York's SoHo neighborhood. He funded Gawker Media, as best I can tell, out of his own pocket. At the same time, he invested in other blog ventures like Treehugger and Curbed. But he's far, far short of Thiel's $500 million a year. In 2004, when he first courted me as a blogger, I asked him where he made his fortune. He gave me a vague answer about currency trading and investing in London real estate. Denton is familiar with the business of manipulating markets. He cowrote All That Glitters, a book on on the 1995 collapse of Barings Bank caused by one young trader.

Having observed Denton for years, I have to say this: He's never seemed happer than when working as an editor. I was almost sorry to replace him as Valleywag's editor a year ago, because he so clearly enjoyed the role. When he appointed himself editor of Gawker in January, it seemed more a homecoming than a temp gig.

That's why I found Denton's note so mysterious. Could he be unhappy as the blogosphere's success story? Does he wish he'd instead joined the lucrative hedge-fund world?

I'll admit I barely know the man. In an age of oversharing, Denton makes an art of revealing no personal details. That's what makes those four words stand out: "Thiel makes me sick!" I almost wish I hadn't asked him to explain himself.

(Photo of Thiel by David Orban; Denton by Matt Haughey)

Six Apart's offices seem pretty ordinary to me. Their meeting space is *tiny*. Googleplex's niceties are all about enticing their workers to stay at work longer — yeah, that's real HAWT!. Valleywag offices look like a dump to me.

Click on each company name for its full galleries.

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Nick Denton Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 7:26 AM

I'm amazed we've managed to keep a lid on this news; that, given your naturally gossipy natures, must be a first! We're spinning off three sites: Idolator, Gridskipper and—this one may be a surprise—Wonkette. There were indeed some rumors about Maura Johnston's music blog late last year; they were true of course. For reasons that I'll explain below, both it and our travel and politics sites have better commercial futures outside Gawker than within. (Excuse the corporate lingo: some of it is unavoidable.) But, first, the facts, which will be hitting the wires later this morning, or as soon as you leak this email. Go ahead!

* IDOLATOR is going to Buzznet, a music-focused web and social network. Buzznet recently acquired Idolator's chief rival, Stereogum, and received a big investment from Universal Music Group. * GRIDSKIPPER isn't going far: it's being taken over by Curbed, the network founded by Lockhart Steele, in which Gawker Media is a shareholder. * WONKETTE is being spun off to the managing editor, Ken Layne, former founder of one of the web's very first news sites, Tabloid.net. The title will become part of the Blogads network of political sites, which includes Daily Kos, among others.

Why these three sites? To be blunt: they each had their editorial successes; but someone else will have better luck selling the advertising than we did.

Music audiences are fragmented across genres; Maura's Idolator gave Stereogum a good run, but a group with a whole array of music sites will command more attention from record labels than we could. In the case of Gridskipper, our urban travel guide, we could never match Curbed in attention to city-specific content and advertising. As for Wonkette: political advertisers are a strange breed; they don't come through the same agencies our sales people deal with.

I'm relieved we've found pretty decent homes for the three sites, and most of their writers, but we're gutted to lose them. Idolator's Pop Critic's Poll was a tremendous coup—and Patric's bleeding-heart logo for the site was one of my favorites. Gridskipper is so far the most sophisticated travel blog: it entirely deserved its inclusion in Time's list of the 50 coolest websites.

And Wonkette is one of the brands with which the company is most associated; people will be shocked that we would ever part with it. The political site has won an array of Bloggies and other awards; it introduced the word ass-fucking into the dictionary of political abuse; the founding editor's slippers are even on display in the new media museum in Washington, DC. And Ken and his team have brought a new liveliness to the site this election season—validated by the record traffic of the last three months.

So why not wait, at least till the election? Well, since the end of last year, we've been expecting a downturn. Scratch that: since the middle of 2006, when we sold off Screenhead, shuttered Sploid and declared we were "hunkering down", we've been waiting for the internet bubble to burst. No, really, this time. And, even if not, better safe than sorry; and better too early than too late.

Everybody says that the internet is special; that advertising is still moving away from print and TV; and Gawker sites are still growing in traffic by about 90% a year, way faster than the web as a whole. But it would be naive to think that we can merely power through an advertising recession. We need to concentrate our energies, and the time of Chris Batty's sales group, on the sites with the greatest potential for audience and advertising.

The dozen sites that remain represent some 97% or our 228m pageviews per month, and an even higher proportion of our growth and advertising revenue. (Key facts are below, in case anyone asks.) We'll be able to devote more attention to breakouts such as Jezebel and io9, as well as established titles such as Gizmodo and Kotaku, which are becoming utterly dominant in their domains. And, then, once this recession is done with, and we come up from the bunker to survey the internet wasteland around us, we can decide on what new territories we want to colonize.

Both Noah and I are around to answer any questions. On email, IM, or phone. I'm 917-XXX-XXXX and Noah is on 917-XXX-XXXX.

Regards

Nick

—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—

GAWKER MEDIA KEY FACTS
* A dozen sites, Gizmodo first launched in August 2002, most recent,
io9, in January 2008
* Gawker, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, Jalopnik, Deadspin, Defamer,
Jezebel, Valleywag, io9, Consumerist, Fleshbot
* A record 18 "Bloggie" nominations in 2008, way more than any other
blog collective (one of those was for Idolator)
* Audience of 29.7m unique visitors a month for the whole network, up
82% at annualized rate (http://www.quantcast.com/p-d4P3FpSypJrlA)
* Each individual site has at least 1m uniques or, in the case of io9, soon will
* Pageviews of 227m in March — 219m if you take out the three sites
being spun out — up 89% on a year earlier (Sitemeter)
* For those who measure these things, Gawker is the web's leading
independent blog group

From: Jason Calacanis

put some math your 9k blog post..... if you're going to bust my chops about something please don't let it be revenue, because i got that on lockdown for a decade.

http://valleywag.com/376042/tipster-mahalo-revenues-are-around-9000-a-month

respek!

best j

ps - Denton is probably losing 2-3k a month on you guys so don't be surprised if he pulls the plug if you can't get to 10m pages. unless of course Valleywag is his own personal way of breaking chops in the valley, which i think it is. then you guys got a gig for a long time.

the biggest part of Denton's scam... i mean business model... is that 90% of traffic to Gawker sites is to the homepage or RSS feeds where you guys get nothing.

so, you can basically take the $7.50 rate and assume 10-20% of that is your actual cut of the posts value.

that being said, it's the best pay in the business... prob. on par with or better than Weblogs, Inc. depending on the blog/person.

Denton was plotting the pay system for two years... it's really amazing that it's come to pass. It's inspiring to see someone cut the business down to it's core and i'm loving watching the results. Some brands will be destory by folks like Jordan who know how to game pageviews, others will boom and make denton sick margins and tens of millions when he sells the brands out from under you guys.

best j

The rate that my employer, Gawker Media, pays its contract writers was adjusted tonight at midnight. A "modest reduction." We'll find out the new pay plan by the end of the week. Writers are expected to continue working. No matter how much traffic their posts generate, writers will receive at least their base. On top of that, productive writers can receive a "Pageview Bonus," which varies depending on which site they write for. If I were a salesperson, I'd expect to know my quarterly sales goals well in advance.

• 1. InfoWorld claims Microsoft bought Yahoo. The respected tech trade's article is so straight-faced and credible that other journos weigh in seriously on the deal.
• 2. CollegeHumor.com serves up a single parody MySpace page. Way to take a vacation today, lusers.
• 3. CNET publishes the Urlrurl hoax we refused to run, plus a hoax about Intellipedia wars. What else should we not believe on CNET today?
• 4. Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton announces the sale of neo-feminist site Jezebel to Conde Nast, and Jezebel introduces new rich-brat editors from the midtown Manhattan world its readers loathe. Can't you just feel Big Nick's love for his female readers?
• 5. Larry Brin and Sergey Page call for 30-second YouTube auditions from people who want to settle the planet Mars as part of a Google/Virgin project. Instead of producing slick hoax videos, why don't you guys go build some real rockets?

Gawker writers are each assigned a "Monthly Base" pay. No matter how much traffic their posts generate in a month, writers will receive at least their base. On top of that, productive writers can receive a "Pageview Bonus," which varies depending on which site they write for. All Gawker sites are assigned a "pageview rate". Any amount of traffic a writer generates over their minimum is paid as "bonus." By comparing their monthly base to the pageview rate of their site, a writer can determine how many pageviews they need to generate per month or, if they exceed their minimum, how much they're getting paid in total. A leaked memo explains the whole process in great detail.

For example, my monthly minimum pay rate works out to 256,000 page views a month. If I deliver under that, I'm (theoretically) reprimanded and encouraged to write more popular posts. To determine my pay for a particular day or month, I multiply my total page view count by Valleywag's pay rate. Our contract is pretty standard fare for performance-based pay, offering a "monthly base" and a "page view bonus." However, Valleywag's writers have soundly beaten their minimum post counts all three months we've had this program in effect. Our page view rate is our de facto pay rate.

Since this plan was announced in late December, we've known that the pay rate is to be changed on the first day of every quarter. I expected to be informed of the pay rate before the month started, but that hasn't happened, even after repeated requests to my superiors. We're working in the digital equivalent of a sweatshop, effectively being paid based on how many views we can drum up — and now the goalposts are being moved mid-kick. This is unnerving and a slap in the face to the "creative underclass" that writes for Gawker's blogs.

If a potential advertiser asked Gawker to start running its ads and promised to negotiate terms later, they'd be laughed out of the room — but that is exactly what the company is asking of its writers. If I were a salesperson, I'd expect to know my quarterly sales goals well in advance.

Gawker Media is, let's not forget, a for-profit business. The company might need time to make proper pricing decisions. But that goes both ways: Writers are for-profit as well and we should not be expected to work blind.

And, no, this is not an April Fools' joke.

(Photo by Hey Paul)

The domain name now points to a blog that's been active since March 10. The writers are "Slatalla" — almost certainly Michelle Slatalla, Quittner's wife — and "Roofie" — presumably Quittner. The prose matches his voice, and the subject fits, since Quittner took an active interest in real estate while at Business 2.0. But real estate is a bread-and-butter subject for Time Inc.'s finance magazines. Josh, rather than starting your own blog, why don't you just apply for a job at Money, run by your former deputy Eric Schurenberg? That seems easier.

Gawker pays $7.50 per thousand pageviews, editor Nick Denton announced recently. Shnayerson's target was 670,000 pageviews. Under Gawker's scheme, which pays a guaranteed rate to bloggers, and a bonus for the pageviews they generate above their target. That means Shnayerson was getting paid $5,000 a month, at minimum. Not bad for a blogger. (Gawker, like Valleywag, is published by Gawker Media, and I report to a guy who reports to Denton. If you want to know our pay rate, just ask.)

Our admittedly biased answer: Duh. We're not alone in this opinion. Leitch wrote his piece for GQ and it ran in an issue that's been out for weeks. He then quoted from it for the Valleywag post. Since when must a reporter ask nicely before writing a piece on someone? According to Cuban fanboys, noted journalism experts all, since forever. Some even believe that Cuban and GQ signed a contract before the magazine could proceed with an article. Anybody up for some mindless outrage?

We're sure that he doesn't care about ethics, only blog hits and garnering attention for increased book sales. — Miguel

Totally not ethical. He basically lied to you and then used your interview for his own personal gain. I'd be more than upset with him and hopefully, the magazine is as well. That was very unprofessional in my opinion. His work for the magazine should be kept separate from his blogging life. — tiffany

Completely unethical, possibly illegal. The magazine that paid for his travel and wage, likely owns all of the intellectual property generated. When the author took that property and used it for his own benefit outside of the company on blog, he may have violated the law. Even if he did not break the law, it was unethical, and bad journalism. These are new issues that have to be tested and figured out though... — PRoales

• No protective sleeve for press room coffee cup.
  
• Photo credential only allows you to take pics of booth dudes, not babes.
  
• Shocks from a designer Taser anytime you roll your eyes at a vendor's use of jargon.
  
• Mandatory lunch with Scoble and Calacanis.
  

We have been informed of inappropriate behavior on the show floor by a credentialed media attendee from the Web site Gizmodo, owned by Gawker Media. Specifically, the Gizmodo staffer interfered with the exhibitor booth operations of numerous companies, including disrupting at least one press event. The Gizmodo staffer violated the terms of CES media credentials and caused harm to CES exhibitors. This Gizmodo staffer has been identified and will be barred from attending any future CES events. Additional sanctions against Gizmodo and Gawker Media are under discussion.

The employee in question, Richard Blakeley, is clearly credited, so it shouldn't be difficult to "identify" him, though both Portfolio and Silicon Alley Insider failed to get that essential detail right. Blakeley tells us that he has received "no notice at all" from CES about the banning. Though, seeing as how CES is over, we've got a year for this to all blow over. And Blakeley has a year to think up another stunt.

Entrepreneurs You guys think money is everything. That is, you think money is some sort of universal currency into which anything can be converted, and which can be converted to anything else.

• Good writing is one of the things you can't buy with just cash. Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, has proven that again and again.
• Even when you guys mean to be helpful, you get it all wrong. (A) You encourage me to demand more money from my editors. The only thing they'll pay extra for is being famous, because that sells more copies without buyers having to read the article first. (B) You offer to let me "pick up a few extra bucks" by writing your kids' college entrance essays.
• Here's an idea: Pay me to mention your company and/or product in one of my articles. Not that I would, but I'm sure someone else will. The astounding thing is in 11 years I've been offered money for everything but a covert endorsement. You guys have a blind spot there.

Engineers It's hard to be smarter than everyone else, isn't it? You tech people never ask anything about my job. Instead, you explain it to me.

• You just know that my life as a professional writer must be exactly like your life as a professional software developer or sysadmin. Salespeople must come by my desk and demand I change my articles so they can close a big deal, right?
  
• You're 100% certain that if you wrote the article instead of me, it would have been better. Lucky for you, your fellow engineers are like string theorists: They'll praise this assertion for its elegance and daring, instead of asking you to prove it with a real-world test.
  
• You'll explain to me that my ideas for articles start from press releases, and must be reviewed prior to publication by the companies I write about. If I recommend your competition, it must mean they bought an ad. You got this worldview from your company's PR lady. You have a crush on her.
  
• Do me a favor: 34 percent of the Internet is comments from engineers that begin, "It is unsurprising to me that ..." Look, we get it. Nothing surprises you. So it's unsurprising to us that it's unsurprising to you. So shut up already.

Bloggers There is, in fact, a special circle of hell reserved for you. You're keeping it real! Real long, and real dull.

• The only other fields where people spend all their time bragging about themselves and insulting their rivals are talk radio and gangster rap. There's your level of intellectual discourse.
  
• Jack Kerouac? He had an editor. Allen Ginsberg? Spent months rewriting "Howl." Andrew Sullivan? Face time with the world's best editors, and he still puts me to sleep when he writes solo.
  
• Free advice: Every time you type the words "not so much," or "the internets," or "Techmeme," reach for that key that says DELETE and press it a few times fast. You're a better writer already!

(Did you notice? I don't hate PR people. Sure, I filter all messages with "for immediate release" or "embargo." But you guys are OK. It helps that you pick up the tab — not the free drinks, but the principle of the thing.)

Nick Denton's new pay scale — more to the point, the reactions to it — prompted me to write all this down. The thing that ties entrepreneurs, engineers and bloggers together is they all think they know everything. If you can suffer through 150 know-it-all posts, you'll find that no one got it right, on two counts.

• I hardly know who Nick Denton is. He emails us all "please log out of nexis" once a week, and has posted one comment to my work: "This post breaks the first rule of internet argument." Since there's only one rule of Internet argument and it's "Don't be boring," I ignore him. I'm logged out of Nexis already.
• Denton's new pay scale works like this: Instead of autobilling him twelve bucks a post, I'm now paid a flat fee in exchange for a minimum number of posts. There's some traffic bonus, but whatever. The important thing is that my extra posts don't cost Denton anything. So I can now post anything I want without feeling guilty. Here you go.

Find him and interview? - O.
—-— Forwarded message —-—
From: Chaela Volpe
Date: Jan 7, 2008 1:35 PM
Subject: Gary Krakow joins TheStreet.com newsroom as Sr. Tech Correspondent, Reports Live from CES in Las Vegas

After a couple moments of silence, Shankman says, "This is the most surreal moment I've ever been witness to." Then, of course, he writes it up. Thanks, buddy.

By the way, Krakow has this to say about his new job:

Valleywag: Why'd you leave MSNBC?
Krakow: MSNBC wanted to go in a different direction. I needed more artistic freedom.
V: Does TheStreet still exist? Have you been paid yet?
K: Don't worry about my paycheck. The new, redesigned site will be up within a few weeks with a focus on video.

Last I checked, Fleshbot wasn't hurting for traffic. Digg, on the other hand, is still trying to build an online-advertising business — first with the help of John Battelle's Federated Media, and now, more recently, Microsoft. Digg's content is wild and woolly enough; neither of those ad-selling enterprises would want to touch a site which carries actual porn.

Fleshbot's charge, in the end, is that Digg is hypocritical: Any URL on fleshbot.com is automatically banned from submission, but sites not dedicated to porn — or not easily identified as such — often get featured prominently, carrying similar content. Again, say I: Boo frickin' hoo.

The presence of such content may enrage Fleshbot's editors. But it just speaks to the challenge Digg has. If Digg is to sell ads — or, better yet, for cofounders Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose, sell the company altogether, for hundreds of millions of dollars, to a large media concern — the answer is to do a better job of policing the site, not letting the wolf-whistle in the door.

Valleyfag: Let me guess at your instructions to the designer for the io9 illustration: "Think Hello Kitty meets the Borg Queen." t3chn0ptimist69: hahaha we just said, "give us a cute gender-neutral thing with a brain implant" Eliza Gauger, the illustrator, is a genius

Where else can we pawn off geek-culture stories about space porn and Star Trek that have nothing to do with making you smarter and richer? Take a break and check out these randy, sex-crazed fruitopians, with their rose-colored technoptimism and their shiny silver jumpsuits. If you don't roll back to Valleywag bent over with laughter, perhaps you never belonged here in the first place. (Photo by M. Weiss/NASA/CXC via Getty Images)

If you know someone obsessively checks his email on his iPhone, should you be insulted when he fails to answer your email in a timely manner? — Brad Stone

Are we about to enter 2008: "The year of the in-flight fistfight caused when the person next to you spends four hours from San Francisco to New York talking loudly on the cell phone about his/her dating habits/pet's grooming needs/excitement over the availability of airplane Wi-Fi?" — Matt Richtel

If the theoretical limit of a social network is about 150 people, does an online social network decline due to the sheer weight of its popularity. Or is decline still tied to too many grandpas signing on making a network un-cool? — Damon Darlin

1. Facebook stays independent and private, strikes a meaningful deal that legitimizes its business plan, and buys a startup.
2. Born out of the writers' strike, at least one "Funny or Die" style site gets big buzz and maybe even gets bought, but it fails to produce any videos near the quality of FoD or Super Deluxe.
3. Google releases some limited version of voice search beyond GOOG 411. During the year, the company's stock tops $800.
4. Digg sells to a major media company for at least $200 million, and founder Kevin Rose starts a non-web-based company.
5. YouTube announces it's adding HD video, but the feature doesn't arrive until 2009.
6. Gawker Media, publisher of this site, starts a men's site and a Web show.
7. Yahoo suffers major layoffs, leading the press to dub it the next AOL.
8. Yet AOL is spun off and reframes itself. At the end of 2008, the company's future is still uncertain.
9. Apple releases a second-generation iPhone, and at least one New York Times article tries to draw a "middle class/rich" line between those who upgrade and those who stick with the first generation.
10. A new videoblogger emerges as the go-to example for slick independent daily vlogging, following Amanda Congdon and Ze Frank.
11. Tumblr, the pared down blogging service, enjoys the popularity that 2007 brought Twitter.
12. Twitter remains independent and spins off a new service.
13. The Internet again fails to drive one presidential candidate to success. So does Chuck Norris.
14. Jason Calacanis, still running his online directory Mahalo, starts another project.
15. A new meme started in a geeky part of the web infiltrates the "normal" population even more deeply than LOLcats.
16. Yet another e-book reader comes out and no one cares.
17. Blog search engine Technorati collapses after failing to get enough funding to stay afloat.
18. The Wall Street Journal announces it will soon be free online.
19. Blog platform maker Six Apart, having spun off LiveJournal and rearranged its exec staff, gets bought.
20. Dell screws up the good will it won in 2007 with another customer-service or bad-parts scandal.
21. Net Neutrality takes another hit from a telco-friendly Congressional bill.
22. Second Life plods along.
23. The TechCrunch blog network lands a regular TV appearance, if not a show.
24. The country tires of the last round of famous-for-being-famous celebs, and gossip blogger Perez Hilton's TV show gets cancelled.
25. A minor medical incident renews the "can Apple survive without Steve Jobs" argument.

Gawker listed the job two weeks ago:

It's no longer enough to take stories from the New York Times, and add a dash of snark. Gawker needs to break and develop more stories. And the new managing editor will need to hire and manage reporters, as well as bloggers. Gawker.com receives more than 10m pageviews per month. Think of Gawker less as a blog than as a full-blown news site. The right candidate will oversee Gawker's evolution.

Gawker likes to say the New York Times is just a fancy blog. With this change, is Gawker to become just a bilious newspaper? Whatever. Denton roughly doubled Valleywag's traffic before he handed this site to me. Maybe he's just eager to prove that wasn't a fluke.

(Photo by scriptingnews)

We've learned that Hinnefeld, referred to as the "IU watchdog" for the Herald-Times, left the newspaper for a media relations position at ... Indiana University. Surprise, surprise. It's reassuring to know that Nick Denton isn't alone in hiring his critics. When Owen Thomas tires of me writing about ChaCha, I look forward to a comfy desk job in lovely Bloomington, Indiana.

They [the Associated Press] ran the story on Ballmer this morning, got the facts all turned around. Did you hear his talk? He used an the analogy of MS Search being a 3 yo basically playing basketball with the big kids, the 12 year olds. Great analogy, really worked for him and got big laughs. Rachel Konrad printed it the other way around and ran a photo that made Ballmer look like a cackling demon. OUCH. MS people were fried and demanded a "reprint". Worst part was she demanded video to prove her wrong.

560,057 unique visitors came to the Op-Ed section in the last week versus 245,942 for the week ending September. The overall site went from 3.4 million to 3.8 million.

In its media kit, the Times says it charges advertisers $28 for a thousand impressions of a leaderboard ad, $39 for a 336x280 ad and $50 bucks for a half page.

Even after figuring in discounts and unsold inventory, those those extra 200,000+ impressions a week go a long way toward buying the Sulzbergers a nice Thanksgiving turkey.

(Graph by Compete.com)