Kudos to my colleague Ben McGrath for finally eliciting some dollar figures for the revenues of Gawker Media. Since that was one of my primary interests, I dropped the story. Denton has moved beyond the stage of running a cottage business, but suggestions that he has joined, or is about to join, the ranks of moguldom, where revenues are measured in the hundreds of millions, or billions, are absurd.
Denton is aware of this disjuncture—up to a point. Though not bigger than NYTimes. Take Time Inc. In April, , its network of sites, which includes People. Today, the Time sites are getting about 50 million visitors a month, an increase of per cent.
Now for advertising. On this basis, it appears hard to argue that Denton is about to sweep away Pinch Sulzberger or Don Graham, still less Murdoch himself. That said, he runs an innovative little company that has some well-known online brands, and he has bigger ambitions. Understandably enough, he likes to group his sites together for publicity and marketing purposes. In fact, they are a diverse collection of businesses, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.
Gizmodo gadgets , Kotaku gaming , io9 sci-fi , and Lifehacker personal productivity are basically geek sites. Naturally, these sites have very different audiences. Persuading corporations to purchase ads across all of them must be tough, which means each site has to stand on its own two feet. But when you break down the audience figures for the individual sites, they look somewhat less impressive.
According to Quantcast, the average visitor to Gawker views about four pages, which means he or she scans the home page and clicks on three stories.
