Month: August 2016

During a discussion in Rome recently, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg denied that his company is a media entity. “No, we are a tech company, not a media company,” he said. But is that description accurate? Not really.

Zuckerberg may not want to admit it, but Facebook is one of the largest and most powerful media companies in the world, and getting larger.

The Facebook co-founder told his Italian audience that the social network isn’t a media company because “we do not produce any content.” Instead, Facebook just builds tools that allow users to interact with each other, which includes sharing news, he said.

But is creating content the only way to define whether a company is a media company? No. To take just one recent example, The Huffington Post didn’t create much of its own content in the early days, before it hired a reporting staff. Users created blog posts and HuffPo distributed and monetized them.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Sorry Mark, but Facebook is definitely a media company”

Gawker Media founder Nick Denton said goodbye to his former company this week, after broadcaster Univision agreed to acquire the publisher of popular websites such as Gizmodo and Jezebel for $135 million, as part of a court-ordered bankruptcy auction.

Univision has agreed to hire 95% of the company’s former employees, but Denton isn’t among them. However, the Gawker founder does get a consolation prize: According to the acquisition documents, he is to be paid $16,666 a month for the next two years as part of a non-compete clause.

The agreement, which Univision reportedly insisted on as part of the acquisition, says that Denton agrees not to “associate with any business enterprise” that is engaged in the same business as Gawker in either the U.S., Puerto Rico or Hungary, without getting permission from Univision first.

Although most of the content for Gawker Media’s websites was created in New York, where the company recently leased an office near Union Square, much of the web development and technical work behind the sites was done by a separate subsidiary based in Hungary. According to the Wall Street Journal, Denton was paid $500,000 a year by Gawker.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Here’s how much Gawker’s Nick Denton will be paid not to work”

The court-ordered bankruptcy auction of Gawker Media approached its final conclusion on Thursday, with most of company’s assets set to be acquired by Univision for $135 million. But one thing that isn’t part of the deal is Gawker.com—the website that launched an alternative blogging empire almost 14 years ago.

In other words, while some of Gawker will continue to live on, as Univision absorbs existing verticals like Gizmodo and Jezebel, what many saw as the heart and soul of the company (to the extent it had either one of those things) will no longer exist. Staff were notified by founder Nick Denton on Thursday afternoon.

In the original offer from Ziff-Davis that Gawker announced when it filed for bankruptcy, it looked as though a window had been left open that might have allowed Denton take over ownership of the main site, but that window appears to have closed. The Univision offer reportedly includes a clause that prevents him from competing with the new owner of his former company.

Univision hasn’t disclosed why it didn’t want to acquire Gawker.com, but it’s likely the reputation of the site (not to mention a conspicuous lack of advertising on that particular vertical) convinced the company not to include it in the deal.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Why the death of Gawker isn’t something to celebrate”

If there’s one macro trend almost every publisher is struggling with, it’s the increasing distribution power of platforms like Facebook, and how that is disrupting traditional media business models. Where they once controlled the entire process from creation to consumption, media companies now see their power over almost all the elements of that value chain ebbing rapidly.

As Facebook tries to get publishers to host all of their content on its platform with features like Instant Articles, which provides faster-loading mobile pages, Google has been trying to offer an alternative that it says is more open and more flexible—a feature known as AMP, which is short for Accelerated Mobile Pages.

In its pitch for AMP, which officially launched in February, Google has stressed that it is trying to help strengthen the open web because it wants to blunt the force of walled gardens like Facebook [fortune-stock symbol=”FB”]. Unlike Instant Articles, the AMP standard is an open-source project, one which any publisher can contribute to. As Google’s head of news, Richard Gingras, put it earlier this year:

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Google says it is trying to help publishers, but some remain skeptical”

As Gawker Media prepares for a court-ordered bankruptcy auction to sell off its assets to the highest bidder, the billionaire venture capitalist who helped drive the company under wrote in a New York Times opinion piece that he is happy to have played a role in its failure, and that he would happily do so again if necessary.

Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley VC who helped create the online payment company PayPal and was also one of the earliest investors in Facebook, was revealed as the financial backer of former wrestler Hulk Hogan after Hogan won an unprecedented $140-million Florida court judgement against Gawker in March.

Unable to pay such a massive penalty—which amounts to almost three times its annual revenues—Gawker was forced to seek bankruptcy protection and is now engaged in an auction to sell the company’s assets, an auction that began today with bids from multiple companies (there’s a list here of the most likely bidders).

In his New York Times essay, Thiel said that he was “proud to have contributed financial support” to Hogan’s case, which involved a video clip that Gawker published from a sex tape the wrestler made with a friend’s wife. Thiel went on to say that he will continue supporting Hogan, since Gawker has said it intends to appeal, and that he would “gladly support someone else in the same position.”

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Billionaire who helped bankrupt Gawker says he would do it again”

After its dramatic loss to former wrestler Hulk Hogan in a landmark privacy trial, New York-based publisher Gawker Media is being auctioned off to the highest bidder this week, in order to try and pay the $140-million penalty in the case. All bids are due by the end of business on Monday.

Dozens of publishing companies and other media-industry players have expressed interest in potentially making an acquisition offer for the company over the past few months, according to sources with knowledge of the auction. But in many cases these are competitors who are just looking for more information about Gawker’s revenues, etc. and aren’t seriously thinking about acquiring the company.

At the top of the list of companies who are expected to make a bid is long-time magazine publisher Ziff-Davis, which has already signed an offer to buy the company for $90 million.

That deal was announced at the same time Gawker filed for court protection. Bankruptcy auctions typically involve such a “stalking-horse bid,” which is used to set a floor for potential acquisition offers, but other bidders could come in with higher offers.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Here are the most likely bidders in Gawker Media’s bankruptcy auction”

Media companies that rely on so-called “clickbait” headlines or similar tricks to try and get users to click on their posts might want to rethink that strategy. Facebook said on Thursday that it has tweaked its all-powerful news-feed filtering algorithm to reduce the prominence of this kind of content, because it says readers want to see more “genuine” posts.

And how does Facebook define what constitutes clickbait vs. a genuine post? In a post on the site describing the new algorithm changes, data scientist Alex Peysakhovich and user-experience researcher Kristin Hendrix said that a team at the social network looked at thousands of headlines and came up with a few rules.

“We categorized tens of thousands of headlines as clickbait by considering two key points,” the blog post says. “(1) if the headline withholds information required to understand what the content of the article is; and (2) if the headline exaggerates the article to create misleading expectations for the reader.”

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “You’ll never guess what Facebook is doing to reduce clickbait”