Having already repositioning Silicon Valley gossip site Valleywag as a column of the Gawker website, Nick Denton’s blog network has folded their Hollywood focused site, Defamer, into the main site too. Denton says that the move will help boost a national readership to the site with New York beginnings.
Hollywood gossip site Defamer is being merged into Gawker, the company’s flagship gossip title. The four-year-old title will continue as Gawker’s entertainment column; the movie-industry stories will remain showcased on Defamer.com but the sites will be staffed and managed as one.
Gawker now draws more than 3m visitors a month — four times the audience it had in 2007. More than three-quarters of Gawker’s readership is from outside New York. The inclusion of Defamer’s Hollywood gossip — following an expansion of political coverage last year and the incorporation of Valleywag — reflects Gawker’s evolution into a national gossip site.
Over on the Silicon Alley Insider, Nicholas Carlson says that the move has been made because brands and their media agencies are more interested in quick hits with big traffic sites than targeting audiences with niche titles:
Gawker Media owner Nick Denton wanted to sell his Los Angeles-based entertainment blog Defamer, but he apparently found no takers. Instead, the site will fold into Gawker proper. In December 2008, Denton did the same thing with Silicon Valley gossip blog, Valleywag.
The theory is that it’s easier to get agency brand managers to spend their clients’ money on one very popular Web destination than it is to convince them to spend the same amount on lots of niche sites.
The team at Gawker have always been an inspiration to us at PSFK – we admire the way they have tried and tested fearlessly. Where they lead, the rest of us follow. This news is an early indication of a major shift that could be about to happen in the blog media space.
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