Are Gawker Medias blogs designed to appeal to certain advertisers?
Steele: We don’t design sites around advertisers. Our goal is to build trust with readers by being as honest as possible and to let our bloggers write about what’s really going on. The idea is like, if we can build a travel site that a lot of people look at, eventually the right advertisers will find it. These sites don’t need to be profitable out of the gate. We’re not trying to make our money back over night. It’s definitely a long-term play. Q: Is Gawker Media profitable? Steele: It is profitable. We’re very small, have no overhead, no office space. Everybody works from home. And you heard what we pay our writers. Nick founded Gawker very specifically with the idea of starting a whole bunch of blogs in very niche topic areas, hire free-lance writers to write each of them, hopefully draw a lot of eyeballs, and then sell advertising around it. He had the idea that no one site would probably ever make a fortune. But if you have 10 sites each making $75,000 a year, then, O.K., maybe it’
