Gawker a Buyout Candidate?

Posted on September 14, 2006

Frank Barnako reports that Gawker was one of the companies in a list of buyout candidates presented by an investment banker to the Online Publishers Association.

YouTube, Bankrate.com (RATE), eHarmony, and Gawker are on a list of candidates for buyouts shown by an investment banker at a presentation to the Online Publishers Association this morning.
Tolman Geffs, managing director of Jordan, Edmiston Group, said the number of deals for online consumer media companies has nearly doubled in the last three months. There have been 91 in the last nine months compared to 47 in the three previous quarters.

The last word on this from Gawker publisher Nick Denton was that Gawker's blog network was not for sale. Denton also said Gawker Media is "unacquirable."

Nick Denton, publisher of Gawker Media, doesn't believe there's really been a big rush of VC money or Big Media interest in blog publishing. He told me Gawker's blogs would cease doing what they do best if they were bought by a mainstream media company.
"Put the Gawker titles in a media conglomerate and they would spontaneously combust," Denton said via e-mail. "Imagine, for instance, how AOL Time Warner would handle the X-rated party photos in yesterday's Fleshbot, or a snide report on Defamer about the latest dross from Warner Brothers, or Gawker's borderline libelous mockery of [Time Warner CEO] Dick Parsons. Without media conglomerates as targets, the Gawker titles would have no purpose. Gawker is not for sale but it is, more importantly, and in a deeper sense, unacquirable.

That was from November, 2005. Gawker did recently put blogs on the block and closed Sploid -- the Sploid site now contains the depressing message: "Sploid is closed, and its domain and content archive are for sale." However, Gawker also just launched another new blog: Idolator.