Nick Denton, a British expat and former Financial Times reporter, made millions by selling the rights to First Tuesdays, a dotcom-era series of forums and mixers that he co-founded. He was a very early player in news aggregation with Moreover Technologies, launched in 1999. But he carpet-bombed the media landscape with the launch of Gawker, a shamelessly nasty celebrity gossip blog. This was December 2002, when most people were still trying to figure out this thing called a web log.
Nick Denton is founder and proprietor of the blog collective Gawker Media, and the managing editor of the New York-based Gawker.com. Fleshbot, a site devoted to porn reviews that launched in November 2003, was sooo not safe for work -- but it got 10 times the traffic of any other Gawker site its first week, according to Denton, thanks in part to linking to the Paris Hilton sex tape. Wonkette became the place for Washington insider info, while Gizmodo took advantage of keen consumer interest in the latest and greatest consumer electronics -- and of advertisers' interest in reaching early adopters. His writers' eyeball-melting acidity helped to create the take-no-prisoners style of today's gossip blogs and launched several careers.
Denton also launched the blog business model of paying bloggers by the post -- and damn little for each, helping to fuel today's breathless pace of blog news. His revenue model quickly moved from AdSense to display and custom ads, as he lined up A-list advertisers like Nike.
Today, Gawker Media properties reach 12.9 million unique visitors each month, according to Quantcast. But the roster of blogs has slimmed down. In October, Denton cut employees at titles that weren't paying their way and added a few hires for the best performers.
In a remarkably kind and sympathetic email to Gawker editors, he said he was battening down the hatches in preparation for an "exceptionally difficult" 2009. At the same time, he's posted warnings on his
personal blog. Denton estimates that online ad revenues next year will be down 30 to 40 percent.
We asked Denton if the situation is
really that dire.
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