The fact that Nick Denton’s Gawker Media is making a bundle despite the recession, filling its sites with heavyweight advertisers, is old news. That doesn’t stop Advertising Age to feature the blog network as something that is actually working. It gets a bit silly though:
Did Gawker Media just grow up? The little web publisher that big media loves to hate is now teaching them a thing or two about brand advertising. No belly-fat ads, ads with festering sores or diet-success stories; just big, splashy brand ads from HBO, Audi and Samsung.
I don’t exactly recall the Gawker Media brands being littered by Civony Adsense ads before everything went downhill in the advertising industry. But fine, yeah, there’s no doubt that the 45% revenue increase accounts for some sort of maturation. I’d like to put that to the fact that advertisers get the web and its strengths over old media channels better these days. After all, when you feel the pinch it is a good thing to be able to track everything in realtime.
