The transfer of Wonkette by Nick Denton of Gawker Media, my former Financial Times colleague who went on to other things, is a warning to those thinking of launching new media ventures.
Nick has sold, or perhaps more accurately passed on, three of the blogs in his empire including Wonkette, which was the founding blog about politics and Washington DC.
It still has healthy traffic figures – 5.9m page views in March – and is attracting a lot of interest in this election season. So why give it away – or something like that – to Ken Layne, its managing editor?
The answer is, in short, that there is not much advertising in political coverage. Nick’s biggest sites, such as Gawker, Gizmodo and Jezebel, draw advertisers because they have high traffic and clear commercial niches.
Technology companies can advertise to readers of a gadget blog such as Gizmodo while, to judge by the ads on Gawker, film and television companies hope to drum up viewers by advertising there.
But Wonkette was the closest thing he had to a general news site focusing on a traditional subject. That did not make it attractive to any particular group of advertisers, so Wonkette was not very profitable.
Nick has himself put the sale in the context of hunkering down for an advertising recession. It raises the broader point that a lot of “free” content on the internet ultimately depends on attracting advertising.
If there is none in the segment, then the future of blogs as businesses is suspect. I wonder what this means for the newer online politics publications such as the Huffington Post and Politico?
