Yahoo and Gawker Deal to End

Posted on July 22, 2006

Nick Denton blogs that the Gawker-Yahoo content deal where censored content from some Gawker Media blogs appeared on Yahoo is coming to an end.

We're letting our content partnership with Yahoo lapse. 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.

Nick Denton says it doesn't have anything to do with Yahoo's recent stock plunge. Denton said, "Finally, yes, Valleywag's persecution of Lloyd Braun, head of Yahoo Media, probably cast a pall over the relationship." However, Denton also gave Yahoo credit for never pressuring them to remove a blog post.

Yahoo also has content deals with the Huffington Post and RealClearPolitics and there are no signs that these deals are ending.