August 06, 2015
Source: Shutterstock
How they make the money, Denton doesn”t really care, as YouTuber Sargon of Akkad perceptively points out in this video. He admitted to CNN’s Brian Stelter that he doesn”t even read the stories. Hitting their advertisers, as #Gamergate has done by encouraging corporations not to advertise on Gawker, has cost Denton over seven figures. While Sam Biddle writes that “brands aren”t your friends,” Denton needs brands like him to keep the site in the black. The #Gamergate activists aren”t going away, though, and stand ready to hit Gawker. Here they are out in front of the Gawker offices sending a message.
In fairness, Denton doesn”t have the luxury of a venture-backed tech bubble fueling Gawker, unlike BuzzFeed, the “cat pornography” website that Andreessen Horowitz recently supported with $50 million. Like the clean-tech bubble backed by Ellen Pao before it, the new-media bubble is something that VCs like Marc Andreessen feel they should support. Vice is allegedly worth more than The New York Times“even though its founder is a pathological liar/con man who wastes over $300,000 on dinner. Once the Fed raises interest rates, the new-media bubble will pop. Both the print and digital advertising markets have been rapidly declining. Gawker, BuzzFeed, Vox, and every other ad-supported publication will be competing over an increasingly declining market while they try to signal that they are all doing fine. “BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast, Gawker, Quartz, Business Insider, the Intercept, Talking Points Memo, and ProPublica are all located a short walk from one another in lower Manhattan,” reports The New York Review of Books. No one seems to know why. Bubbles have a way of making people insular, especially status-signaling journalists who seem to spend all day laughing amongst each other as Twitter’s stock price collapses.
Click-bait writing is grueling, difficult work in a declining industry. Healthy industries don”t unionize; they increase salaries to keep valuable people around. But Gawker employees are offered pitiful two-month severance buyouts if they want to quit. Unionization”which has hit Salon, Gawker, and The Guardian“may yet bring transparency to their books. Even Denton, though, is looking for an out from the hell he created. He reportedly met with billionaire Mark Cuban”himself not averse to bubbles
“who dismissively told him to take Gawker public. But that”ll never happen, as the costs for Gawker’s terrorism continue to increase.
Denton, who loves being at the center of the party, has thus far escaped the social costs, but that shouldn”t be permitted. And if anyone should find anything damaging on a Gawker writer or staffer, please do let me know. Assuming your information is true”yes, I do due diligence, unlike Gawker”I”d be happy to buy it from you for an agreed-upon price. After all, the best way to defeat terrorists is to make sure their network can”t grow and that they can”t profit off of their terrorism.
