Gossip as gossip can bring sales
Blogosphere: Gawker Media, America's most successful blogging company, is raking in millions.
Bloggosphere Gawker Media, America's most successful blogging company, rakes in millions.
A good blog, according to the collective wisdom of industry insiders, must be addictive. Why else would you go to the same website several times a day to read snippets of new content? English journalist Nick Denton adopted this principle six years ago when he began building up Gawker Media in New York, which has grown into a media empire. "Exactly what English newspapers have been doing for years is also successful on the Internet," says Denton, a former Financial Times journalist. The core of the company, which now consists of 15 different websites, is Gawker.com, a constantly updated and expanded gossip blog about the American and especially the New York media scene. It's all about the stars and makers of the latest hit TV series, such as the current "Sex and the City" spin-off for teenagers called "Gossip Girl", which is due to come to Germany this year. It's about the latest cost-cutting measures at the New York Times, the US tour of German band Tokio Hotel and a 20-year-old video showing talk show host Bill O'Reilly going berserk, not understanding what was written on his teleprompter and exploding with anger.
But although Gawker.com gets the most press and America's biggest media groups advertise there, the tech and gaming blogs Gizmodo.com, Lifehacker.com and Kotaku.com are even more popular with the public. But the sex blog Fleshbot.com, the celebrity blog Defamer.com and the fashion site Jezebel.com are also very popular with the public. Defamer scored a hit this year when it featured a Scientology video by Tom Cruise, which brought the company almost 250 million page views.
All of Gawker Media's blogs have one thing in common: their cynical, irreverent and therefore entertaining tone, which, according to the company, attracts a total of 20 million users. "It has introduced a new style of gossip reporting that is more like the English style," says Alex Halavais, a communications professor at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut. "That is, give the readers what they want."
Where there are readers, there are also advertisers. "Blogs are playing a growing and profitable role in advertising because you can divide readers into smaller and smaller segments," says Halavais. It is also possible to use click-through figures to measure exactly who is actually looking at an advertising message.
Gawker Media's annual turnover is estimated at around twelve million dollars, with production and personnel costs remaining low, as readers are also asked to send in tips and internal information from their companies. The company now has 130 employees. "Talk is cheap," says blogger and cultural critic Mark Dery, a lecturer at New York University, alluding to the conversational tone of the blogs. "It's a job for milquetoast university graduates who are willing to work for a pittance." Although Denton refers to his products as "web journalism", writers who work for traditional media generally want nothing to do with it. Dery calls blogging "opinion piece writing. It's just a shame that it's dragging journalism into the abyss."
Gerti Schön, New York
A good blog, according to the collective wisdom of industry insiders, must be addictive. Why else would you go to the same website several times a day to read snippets of new content? English journalist Nick Denton adopted this principle six years ago when he began building up Gawker Media in New York, which has grown into a media empire. "Exactly what English newspapers have been doing for years is also successful on the Internet," says Denton, a former Financial Times journalist. The core of the company, which now consists of 15 different websites, is Gawker.com, a constantly updated and expanded gossip blog about the American and especially the New York media scene. It's all about the stars and makers of the latest hit TV series, such as the current "Sex and the City" spin-off for teenagers called "Gossip Girl", which is due to come to Germany this year. It's about the latest cost-cutting measures at the New York Times, the US tour of German band Tokio Hotel and a 20-year-old video showing talk show host Bill O'Reilly going berserk, not understanding what was written on his teleprompter and exploding with anger.
But although Gawker.com gets the most press and America's biggest media groups advertise there, the tech and gaming blogs Gizmodo.com, Lifehacker.com and Kotaku.com are even more popular with the public. But the sex blog Fleshbot.com, the celebrity blog Defamer.com and the fashion site Jezebel.com are also very popular with the public. Defamer scored a hit this year when it featured a Scientology video by Tom Cruise, which brought the company almost 250 million page views.
All of Gawker Media's blogs have one thing in common: their cynical, irreverent and therefore entertaining tone, which, according to the company, attracts a total of 20 million users. "It has introduced a new style of gossip reporting that is more like the English style," says Alex Halavais, a communications professor at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut. "That is, give the readers what they want."
Where there are readers, there are also advertisers. "Blogs are playing a growing and profitable role in advertising because you can divide readers into smaller and smaller segments," says Halavais. It is also possible to use click-through figures to measure exactly who is actually looking at an advertising message.
Gawker Media's annual turnover is estimated at around twelve million dollars, with production and personnel costs remaining low, as readers are also asked to send in tips and internal information from their companies. The company now has 130 employees. "Talk is cheap," says blogger and cultural critic Mark Dery, a lecturer at New York University, alluding to the conversational tone of the blogs. "It's a job for milquetoast university graduates who are willing to work for a pittance." Although Denton refers to his products as "web journalism", writers who work for traditional media generally want nothing to do with it. Dery calls blogging "opinion piece writing. It's just a shame that it's dragging journalism into the abyss."
Gerti Schön, New York
