Gawker Media

Gawker Media LLC (formerly Blogwire, Inc. and Gawker Media, Inc.) was an American online media company and blog network. It was founded by Nick Denton in October 2003 as Blogwire, and was based in New York City. Incorporated in the Cayman Islands, as of 2012, Gawker Media was the parent company for seven different weblogs and many subsites under them: Gawker.com, Deadspin, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Jalopnik, and Jezebel. All Gawker articles are licensed on a Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial license. In 2004, the company renamed from Blogwire, Inc. to Gawker Media, Inc., and to Gawker Media LLC shortly after. In 2016, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after damages of $140 million were awarded against the company as a result of the Hulk Hogan sex tape lawsuit. On August 16, 2016, all of the Gawker Media brands, assets except for Gawker.com, were acquired at auction by Univision Communications for$135 million. Two days later on August 18, the company announced that Gawker.com would cease operations the following week, while its other sites will continue to operate. On September 21, 2016, Univision moved all of the Gawker Media properties to their newly-created Gizmodo Media Group. Gizmodo was subsequently acquired by Great Hill Partners along with The Onion in 2019 under the G/O Media Inc. umbrella, reportedly for less than $50 million. While Denton has generally not gone into detail over Gawker Media's finances, he made statements in 2005 that downplayed the profit potential of blogs declaring that "[b]logs are likely to be better for readers than for capitalists. While I love the medium, I've always been skeptical about the value of blogs as businesses", on his personal site. In an article in the February 20, 2006 issue of New York Magazine, Jossip founder David Hauslaib estimated Gawker.coms annual advertising revenue to be at least$1 million, and possibly over $2 million a year. Combined with low operating costs—mostly web hosting fees and writer salaries—Denton was believed to be turning a healthy profit by 2006.