Last fall, Duncan reported on these pages a distribution agreement between Nick Denton’s Gawker Media empire and Yahoo!.
Duncan famously asked Does the Gawker/Yahoo! tie up suck D*ck?
Apparently it did…
Nick Denton announced yesterday that Gawker and Yahoo! would part ways:
The bald truth is that the deal, which we announced in November, garnered way more attention than we expected, but less traffic. A few new readers probably discovered Gawker, or one of the other four sites that we syndicated to Yahoo. I doubt many of them stayed. Yahoo has a mass audience; Gawker appeals to a peculiarly coastal, geeky and freaky demographic. And these people are more likely to come to our sites through word of mouth, or blog links, or search engine results, or Digg, not because of a traditional content syndication deal.
Denton admits that Valleywag’s regular attacks on Yahoo Media’s Lloyd Braun likely created some issues in the relationship – but that Yahoo! had never pressured them to remove a post.
What does this mean for Gawker? They’ll continue to create offbeat and interesting content – and it’s doubtful that this change with their relationship with Yahoo! will have much of an impact on their overall traffic.
