Gawker Media

I only just noticed that Gawker Media finally has a website. I'm very late to this game: Scott Kidder linked to it back in October, and I have no idea how long it was up before then. It already needs updating: Valleywag and Consumerist aren't mentioned in the list of titles, and neither is Fleshbot, which recently got elevated to the Gawker Media logo/masthead thingy. In any case, there are three different pages with Gawker's ad rates, so you can easily see how much blog advertising can cost these days. It turns out that a banner across the top of the page costs less than a box well below the fold: internet readers must really be good at tuning out ads which aren't in the direct line of copy.

As ever, Nick Denton is good at letting the public see his stats: we can see, for instance, that Defamer not only gets significantly more traffic than Gawker, but even gets more traffic than Fleshbot.

Defamer gets 355,011 pageviews per day; Fleshbot gets 321,898; Gawker gets 271,486; Lifehacker gets 130,233; Kotaku gets 123,029; Deadspin gets 109,527; Wonkette gets 95,359; Jalopnik gets 89,695; Sploid gets 30,220; Screenhead gets 21,494; and Gridskipper gets 16,104. The top website of all is Gizmodo, with 456,561 pageviews per day; the brand-new Consumerist and Valleywag are already up to 24,860 and 37,769 respectively, and I'm sure will rise much higher. Kinja I'm not sure about, but we can assume it's negligible.

There are some interesting numbers there: I, for one, had no idea that Kotaku was so popular, or that Sploid and Gridskipper were still going absolutely nowhere, even with Gridskipper's archive pages slowly beefing up. In any case, Gawker Media's total inventory, adding everything up, is now over 2 million pageviews per day.

In theory, if all four ad spaces were sold on each page, that would generate $28 per thousand pageviews. In Gawker's case, if all four ad spaces were sold to the same advertiser, it would generate $50. But the fact is that most of Gawker Media's ad pages still seem to be pretty free of ads most of the time, except for text ads sold by Adbrite.

Let's say that in reality, Gawker Media gets $3 per thousand pageviews. That's still $6,250 per day, or almost $2.3 million per year. Such a number is far from outlandish, considering that Daily Candy reportedly thinks it will have revenue of $20 million this year. If Gawker Media could sell 50% of its ad inventory, it would be up to $10.7 million in revenues. Then, of course, there's whatever revenue Gawker gets from its deal with Yahoo.

Nick Denton clearly loves launching blogs, and I'm sure he's both got and is making so much money that he's not overly concerned with squeezing every last dollar out of Gawker Media that he can. But it's worth noting that if Gawker Media were to partner with a media company with excess demand from online advertisers, Denton could offer over three quarters of a billion pageviews per year: he's certain to hit the billion mark pretty soon. Not that Gawker Media is for sale, of course. But think about it: iVillage was generating about 362 million pageviews per month when it was sold to NBC Universal for $600 million. At $1.65 per pageview per month, Gawker Media would be worth over $100 million. And Gawker Media, of course, doesn't come with $80 million per year in expenses.

I believe Nick when he says he doesn't want to sell – especially now that Fleshbot seems to be fully part of the Gawker Media fold. The company is not a natural fit for any strategic buyer, even if headlines like this one are not quite as common as they used to be. But the fact is that his equity in Gawker Media is worth a hell of a lot of money. If I had to guess, I'd say that Nick will build his up traffic for another couple of years, suddenly start selling a lot more ads to generate monster earnings growth, and then cash out by taking Gawker Media public. Imagine: the first blog IPO.

Posted by Felix at 23:46 EST