When Gawker CEO Nick Denton led damage control in July after widespread blowback from a story about a Conde Nast executive’s would-be weekend romp with a gay porn star, he set his site’s funeral in motion.
Denton began to speak softer about Gawker, previewing a site that could no longer serve as the premier middle finger to other media — and advertisers — because that tone no longer made business sense.
“The fact of the matter is that it is really hard to sell Gawker, Gawker.com in particular, because Gawker.com likes to pick fights with pretty much everybody,” he told staff in a two-hour meeting after the Conde Nast fiasco.
Denton concluded by promising Gawker would still be a business that supports editorial freedom. But it was also a business and “needs to survive in order for it to support that.”
This was the deathbed confessional for the Gawker we all knew and loved (and loved to hate).
“The company walked a tightrope, trying to keep its roots as outrageous but not be so freewheeling that advertisers are scared off,” Rick Edmonds, Poynter media business analyst, told TheWrap in response to the news on Tuesday that Gawker is morphing into a politics site and laying off staffers in the process.
That tightrope snapped in July when the site went too far with the Conde Nast story. Discover was the lone advertiser to walk away, but Denton acknowledged that his decision to take down the story was prompted in part by his fear of losing additional advertising.
“If the post had remained up, we probably would have triggered advertising losses this week into seven figures,” he said. “Fortunately, though, I was only aware of one advertiser pausing at the time the decision to pull the post was made.”
Executive editor Tommy Craggs and editor-in-chief Max Read resigned over Denton’s decision to pull the story. On their way out, both criticized Gawker for giving in to advertiser pressure.
Craggs said the story had become “radioactive” and Discover and BFGoodrich’s threats to walk away unduly influenced Denton.
Read ripped Denton for allowing noneditorial business executives to participate in the decision to take down the story, calling it an “unacceptable and unprecedented breach of the editorial firewall” that made a “joke” of Gawker’s claim to be the world’s largest independent media company.
The Conde Nast debacle came less than a year after the “GamerGate” scandal. That was sparked by a Gawker Media writer, who tweeted, “Nerds should be constantly shamed and degraded into submission.”
Mercedes and Adobe weren’t laughing, and cut their ads with the company.
Adding to the pressure on Gawker Media is wrestling icon Hulk Hogan’s $100 million lawsuit over the sex tape the site published featuring the former wrestler. That case goes to court in early 2016.
Gawker bowed to the increasingly clear reality that it couldn’t continue to disregard practical advertising concerns, said Jennifer Kavanagh, who ran digital operations at NBC and Oxygen.
Kavanagh, now a media strategist at Brave Ventures, said now is a perfect pivot point for Gawker.
“My sense is that it’s a recognition of a major revenue opportunity. If one is to consider a pivot of this nature, it is well-timed as we move into an election year,” she said.
Whether Gawker 2.0 succeeds is anybody’s guess. But the cause of the original’s death is clear: a massive stroke induced by advertisers that at one point in time Gawker shrugged off.