Has Gawker jumped the shark?

Gawker jumped the shark today. I don't think it's the fault of its two new editors, Matt Haber and Jessica Coen, both of whom are talented and funny writers. Nor do I blame Lockhart Steele, the new editorial director. No: this latest turn of events has Nick Denton written all over it.

Nick certainly never intended Gawker to be the kind of site which hosts hard-core pornographic videos. Here's what he had in mind before it launched:

Gawker is an online magazine for Manhattan launching in January 2003. It's target audience is the city's media and financial elite. Think of it as the New York Observer, crossed with Jim Romenesko's MediaNews.

Gawker actually succeeded very well at that, and pretty soon nearly all of Manhattan's media (if not financial) elite were reading it.

Gawker's success, in turn, helped generate buzz for more downmarket blogs in the Gawker Media stable, like Defamer (Hollywood gossip) and Fleshbot (outright porn).

By July of 2004, I was pointing out that Gawker's self-proclaimed readership of "600,000 media junkies each month" was, on the face of it, higher than the total number of media junkies in the known universe. That posting ended up with a wager between me and Nick Denton: if Gawker managed to get itself more than 600,000 unique visitors in any month of 2004, I would buy Nick lunch at Lever House.

The lesson of this story is don't go into a bet with Nick Denton. I lost that bet. The small reason was Tara Reid's left nipple; the large reason was that Gawker had given up on appealing only or even mainly to media junkies.

In early November, Ms Reid managed to let a breast out in public, Gawker covered it, and traffic went through the roof. On November 8, Gawker got 110,000 visits, compared to 49,000 a week previously. Most of those visits were evidently from people who hadn't visited Gawker before: the site's unique visitors jumped to 833,000 in November from just 425,000 in October.

Denton was mildly apologetic when he called in the bet: he knew a nipple-induced spike from genuine repeat readership. But in fact, although the number of unique visitors to Gawker did fall back in the holiday month of December, it then continued to rise, surpassing the 1 million mark for the first time in January.

But these weren't media junkies – they were people looking for dirty celebrity gossip, which had previously been the province of Defamer and Fleshbot. When the contents of Paris Hilton's mobile phone got posted on the web last week, all of the Gawker Media sites covered the story extensively, but Gawker itself took the lead. On February 22, at the height of the most recent Paris Hilton frenzy, Gawker got 220,000 visits in one day – a new record. Aggregating across all of Gawker Media, gloated Denton, the total number of pageviews reached 1.8 million. 434,000 of those were from his flagship site.

I don't think I'm betraying any confidences when I say that Nick Denton likes it when his sites get a lot of traffic. In Gawker's mix of high and low, it's the low which drives the traffic; the high gets Denton a certain amount of respect and lunch meetings. My guess is that Nick's now had lunch with pretty much anybody and everybody he wants to have had lunch with; his priority now is on goosing his traffic numbers.

Hence the full-court press when it came to Paris Hilton's Sidekick. Gawker linked to the full address book the minute it appeared on gorillamask.net: Denton's site was one click away from a whole slew of celebrities' phone numbers and email addresses. Similarly, when a video appeared today featuring Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst having very explicit sex with an unidentified girl, Gawker was more than happy to link to that. Private phone numbers, private sex videos – so long as you're a celebrity, there's nothing that Gawker won't link to.

The real shark-jumping, however, came later in the day, when Gawker decided to host the video themselves. Anybody going to Gawker's Fred Durst Sex Tape page was immediately confronted with the full two-minute video, and quite possibly put off their dinner for the rest of the day. The irony is that the title of the page was "The Fred Durst Sex Tape You Never Wanted" – well, if you went to that page, you got it whether you wanted it or not.

Gawker Media has hosted pornographic material on its webservers for a long time, of course, as part of its Fleshbot service. But this was video, not stills, and Gawker, not Fleshbot. Now note that Gawker's advertising page still comes with glowing notices from the likes of the Guardian, the New York Times and Time magazine. "Followers of Gawker include Michael Gross of the New York Daily News, Howard Stern, Kurt Andersen of NPR, Jodi Kantor of the New York Times, Deborah Schoeneman of New York Magazine, Ed Needham of Rolling Stone, and Maer Roshan of Radar," it says; it's my guess that most of those people read Gawker much less than they used to, and that none of them (with the possible exception of Howard Stern) think very much of the fact that Gawker was hosting the Fred Durst sex tape.

Denton has always valued traffic over advertisers: he's happy to lose advertisers if they object to risqué content, because that content means more pageviews and ultimately more advertising revenue. But if I were Denton, I'd be very worried that CheapTickets, the launch sponsor of Denton's new Gridskipper site, decided to pull its sponsorship after just two days, because, in Nick's words, "our travel site was too naughty". Denton put a brave face on it, releasing a statement saying that "Gridskipper will continue its obsessive search for the planet's hottest bods, with the occasional hotel recommendation thrown in". But the loss of a launch sponsor after just two days looks, to borrow from Lady Bracknell, more like carelessness than a misfortune. To put it another way: Gawker Media's rush downmarket, in what seems to be an increasingly desperate attempt to maximise pageviews, is actually jeopardising the integrity of its sites and of its editors.

Gawker, as I say, was never meant to be the kind of site which hosts porn videos. And Choire Sicha, the flamoyantly gay former editorial director of Gawker Media, was never the kind of person who would make cheap shots about lesbians – you know, talk about how they wear Birkenstocks and "comfy" pants, that kind of thing. Yet as I pointed out on MemeFirst earlier today, that's exactly what he's been reduced to doing, in his role as guest-editor of Wonkette, another Gawker Media site. Less than 18 months ago, Choire was castigating those who perpetuated the rumour that Condoleezza Rice might be gay; today, he has joined their ranks. Nothing has changed, in the interim, in terms of public knowledge about Rice's sexuality. What has changed is Gawker Media's attitude to such tidbits.

When Gawker was riding high in the buzz rankings, Denton would talk evangelically about the way that his weblogs could target small and affluent audiences, and get premium advertising revenue by doing so. That idea seems to have gone straight out the window: by going downmarket, Denton might have lost a couple of high-end advertisers, but that's more than made up for by his increase in traffic. Gawker started with buzz, now it's swapped that buzz for profit. Maybe blog publishers have to make a choice: they can have one or the other, but not both. Denton is reputedly obsessed with collegehumor.com – the ultimate high-profit-low-buzz website. But I can assure him that the number of people who read both the New York Observer and collegehumor.com is minuscule. If he's selling a highbrow audience to his advertisers, he's going to have to stop the slide downmarket on his websites.

Maybe he realised that today: a couple of hours after the Fred Durst video went up on Gawker, it got taken down. (OK, full disclosure: after I told Lockhart Steele that I thought he'd jumped the shark, he took the video off the page.) But so long as Denton encourages his bloggers to above everything maximise the number of hits they get, this kind of thing is going to continue to appear. In the short term, it certainly helps Gawker Media's traffic. In the long term, however, it could end up disproving Denton's original idea, that a narrowly-targeted website can attract premium advertisers by dint of its upmarket content and readership. Jason Calacanis, take note!

UPDATE: This page has been getting a lot more attention since Gawker was both sued and served a C&D by Durst. The Smoking Gun, along with the New York Daily News and The Register, says that Durst is seeking $80 million, but I can't see that figure anywhere in the documentation, and have no idea where it comes from. In the suit itself and the letter sent to Gawker, Durst only seems to be asking that they stop hosting the video. But as Gawker's Jessica Coen points out, "we complied before you even got around to wasting paper on us".

I do think that what Gawker did was probably illegal: they republished Durst's intellectual property without his permission. Durst's lawyers list a number of different statutes that Gawker has allegedly violated, and I'm sure that they could win a court case were it to come to that. On the other hand, it might be very difficult for them to show damages, so I'm far from convinced that they could get a large sum of money out of Denton & Co.

Posted by Felix at 19:48 EST

Comments

From Denton's old post i clicked through to Spiers old blogspot site. I had no idea she used to be a member of Gene Expression.

Posted by: David Weman at 18:52 EST, February 27, 2005

Another site to get the sex video (they already built a site :O)

Fred Durst Sex Video

I would skip it altogether though, fat man Freddy and his pathetic hairy beer belly is beyond words. Masha is skinny but looks good.

Posted by: Juan at 16:10 EST, February 28, 2005

I think it jumped the shark because it just isn't funny anymore. Isn't that enough?

Posted by: Josh at 19:47 EST, February 28, 2005