Now Reading
Blog wars: Denton calls Weblogs Inc sites Burger King franchises, tells fat people to f*ck off

Blog wars: Denton calls Weblogs Inc sites Burger King franchises, tells fat people to f*ck off

catfight
The cat fight between Weblog Empire supremo Jason Calacanis and Gawker Media’s Nick Denton has erupted in name calling after Calcanis’ questioning of a Comscore study that placed Gawker Media blogs ahead of sites including Slashdot.

Denton has this to say about Weblogs Inc. at Clickz;
“I know it galls Jason Calacanis that his sites are about as memorable as Burger King franchises, and that none register among the top blogs, except Pete Rojas’s Engadget”

Denton then goes one step further to claim that the big picture of the report is that blog readers are richer and younger, and in a surprising attack on people who may be considered overweight, he states “and one hopes thinner”.

See Also
wedding website examples

Why the weight of a blog reader is important would be known only to Denton, but if you’re anything more than the weight the doctor suggests you should be at, it looks like Denton doesn’t want you reading his blogs.

View Comments (18)
  • Clearly Nick is feeling the heat of having put out a bogus report… I’ve never seen him get nasty like that.

    Fact is we get more traffic in autos, gadget, and video games (the three blogs we have in common), so I’m not sure what he is basing his claims on.

  • What an enjoyable picture. Is that from that terrible cat movie, where they talk and there are ninja cats? If so, that movie has created an enduring legacy of useful jpgs. Clearly, we all need more such pictures.

  • I cant remember where I originally found the pic, I’ve got a few of them stored away for every time something like this happens :-)

    Jason, on your comments, I usually don’t like to take sides on these things, but on this one your 110% right.

  • Is that a Freudian slip in your first sentence, Duncan, or are you trying to tell us something? :-)

    Sure, Denton is a street-fighter. He lives on the edge. This is great stuff for him. When the cat fur flies, facts go out the window, and the coolest dude purrs all the way to Wall Street.

  • So what’s the big deal? Calacanis calls his own readers freaks, why should he care what Denton calls them?

    Oh, wait. It’s OK to insult your own readers, but it’s different when someone else insults them. Now I get it :-).

  • Obligatory Homer Simpson quote to put it all in perspective: “People can come up with statistics to prove anything. Fourteen percent of people know that.”

    Now, being a self-avowed freak I’d like to chime in. I followed Engadget since the launch, back when Phillip Torrone blogged on there. As more blogs from Weblogs appeared, I read them, naturally gravitating towards the ones where I had a keen interest in the subject matter. Isn’t that the point of a blog? Niche audience, done. (I tried reading sites like Gizmodo. Blech. Just a personal preference.) Eventually I was hired by Weblogs. This is personal media meets new media, and it’s (pardon the pun) a win-win situation. I’m still amazed… So there’s full disclosure.

    However, if TBS were to suddently claim their shares were way over NBC on a given night, think no one would care? What if they funded the “measurement” revealing such a claim?

    As a fledgling industry I think it’s imperative there be some level of legitimacy. Stuff happens, and mistakes get made, but this was no boating accident.

  • Hey, Peter, isn’t ‘stirring’ more related to manhood stuff?

    Y’ll should hire your own people to do a survey and release not just the results, but the methodology behind the results.

  • If it’s Denton’s desire to not have anyone overweight read his blogs, then America should oblige. Considering the fact that obesity seems to be an epidemic in this country and the average size for women is 14, that should render his readership almost null. If he doesn’t want readers who weigh in more than he thinks they should, that’s probably what he’ll ultimately get. He deserves nothing more for being a blatant ass.

  • The problem that I have is that if the only thing Nick Denton was trying to prove was that bloggers and blog readers were young affluent individuals, he could have done so without releasing the names of the sites tested. That in itself would have been valuable to the blog community as a whole, it would have said that blogging as a whole was worth investing in. It’s when he tripped over his ego and and put Gawker above slashdot, that he tarnished the validity of his report and damaged any potential value that the cummity would have recieved from it.

  • i love the picture.. and Matthias is right how dose he get off calling them that but wont let others call them stuff
    just plan stupid
    any who I LOVE THE PIC :D

Scroll To Top