In another great sign for blogs becoming a mainstream news and entertainment source, Nick Denton’s blogging empire has struck a distribution deal with Internet media giant Yahoo. Reuters reported:
“Yahoo said it will post “dozens” of stories per day from Gawker Media’s blogs, including New York-media gossip blog Gawker, U.S. political gossip-focused Wonkette, Hollywood insider’s guide Defamer and popular technology blog Gizmodo.
The deal follows Yahoo’s decision in October to begin displaying commentary from online journals or blogs alongside traditional news stories.”
A screenshot from Yahoo News:
This is great news for Gawker, because Yahoo will drive a huge amount of traffic to their sites. PaidContent.org has an interview with Yahoo head of news and finance Scott Moore, who said:
“Why not just buy Gawker? “For one thing, Nick wants to be independent. That’s important to him,” says Moore. Beyond that, “at this point, we’re not in the mode of acquiring blog content. We would rather work with as many as we can.” In fact, Yahoo wants to go broader and deeper, eventually working with smaller blogs “empowering people who don’t buy ink by the barrel.””
That’s great to hear, because I’d like to think that well-branded topic-focused independent blogs have just as much to offer as the likes of Gawker to a ‘distributer’ like Yahoo. More details at Washington Post, Shore (who approves), Susan Mernit.
Update:Mike Arrington has spotted something the rest of us didn’t: “Clicking on associated content pulls up a Yahoo page with the Gawker content (example). It does NOT redirect to Gawker.” So Gawker isn’t getting as many click-throughs as first thought.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)