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.