A historical tidbit: the original business model for Gizmodo was affiliate fees from purchases of gadgets through Amazon. We didn’t have the scale then to make that work. We do now. In December we made $70,000 from Amazon. Without really trying. No seriously, it was an accident.Gawker Media founder Nick Denton • In a memo regarding his company’s business. Let that sink in a little bit. His company is so big that they can make $70,000 in affiliate fees from Amazon in a single month — something which is hard for many sites to pull off.
“According to the warrant, Fox News is apparently accusing me of grand larceny, amongst other things.” Muto confirmed the warrant and seizure of several personal items in a series of posts on Twitter. He remains an employee of Gawker Media, who plan to provide him with legal support, and seems to be taking the news in stride. Muto did not, however, specify what other charges he faces. COO Gaby Darbyshire confirmed that Gawker Media had not been served as of this posting. Coincidentally, while the DA’s office was serving the warrant against Joe Muto, Rupert Murdoch faced a fresh round of ethics questions in the UK. source
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I met Steve Jobs while I worked at Gizmodo. He was always a gentleman. Steve liked me and he liked Gizmodo. And I liked them back. Some of my friends who I used to work with at Gizmodo refer to those days as the Good Old Days. That is because those were the days before it all went to shit. That was before we got the iPhone 4 prototype.Ex-Gizmodo editorial director Brian Lam (now on just-launched site, The Wirecutter), discussing the decline of his relationship with Steve Jobs after the iPhone incident. You know the one. It’s why Gizmodo had to stay home Tuesday when the iPhone 4S was launched. Lam seems regretful of the decline of Gizmodo’s relationship — and his own relationship — with Apple. “Sometimes, I wish we never found that phone at all. That is basically the only way this could have been painless,” he said. “But that’s life. Sometimes there’s no easy way out.” A few weeks before Jobs’ death, Lam sent him an apology. Just in time, it seems.
Oh, hey new Gawker: In case anyone needed a reason to go to Gawker today, here you go. Compared to previous iterations of the redesign, the kickers in front of the topics help a lot. They weren’t there before, making everything sort of blend into one another. Still, though, we think this is a huge mistake on Gawker’s part. By downplaying what made Gawker worthwhile (the snarky blurbs over to the right), they endanger their base. Good luck, though. source
I’m on the record that I think the redesigns will fail. And I’ll now officially opening the betting pool. I think Denton is going to be forced to pull back on this. If anyone wants to wager that the redesign don’t get yanked back (or greatly modified) by, let’s say, June 1… I’ll take your bet.
The problem with the redesign is that I don’t feel compelled to click on any of the stuff on the right side, whatsoever, whereas the previous design encouraged you to click on those links. They’re designed to look like they’re not interesting at all – which is bad because they’re extremely interesting.. The thing is, there are ways to bring focus to things inside of the blog format. But this is the very definition of “cutting off the nose to spite the face.”
Gawker is a site that’s easy to hate, we know this. We’re sure that plenty of people were taking lots of joy in Nick Denton’s misery today. But the thing that bothers us about that stance is that, as harsh as Gawker and Denton come across sometimes, they prove they’re worth their weight in salt every time they get a scoop. When it comes to the Web, nobody tops them, honestly.
» Oh yeah: One thing we cannot and will not get behind is making a million and a half commenters pawns in this silly game. Gawker may deserve it (to some degree), but the readers aren’t worth getting crapped on. We feel bad for them more than anyone else in this endeavor.
Let’s get it on the record: We were really uncomfortable with posting anything about Gawker’s Christine O’Donnell get yesterday. For lots of reasons. First, she’s going to lose next week almost assuredly, and it’s just kicking her while she’s down. Second, the anonymous dude who wrote it is a vile human being. Third, he wrote some nasty things about her. Fourth, and this is the most important one, we don’t want to give Gawker the traffic for this story. This is so loaded with classlessness all around that it’s entirely possible that people might vote for her on Tuesday out of remorse. She’s had a rough few weeks, and she might get some votes out of this. For the love of God, Gawker. This woman is allowed to be a human being. source
Gawker Media: Great job being all classy about Christine O’Donnell
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