(Page 2 of 2)
"Nick's one of the few people I've met whom I'd describe as visionary: he has a real entrepreneurial zeal, a keen eye for new talent, and the enviable self-confidence that comes with having a few million stashed in the bank," said Maer Roshan, the editor and publisher of the magazine Radar, a pop culture magazine. "There's a Warholish aspect to Nick - watching him in action, you get the feeling that he's always cataloguing, filtering, picking up bits up information for future use."
Mr. Denton, a former journalist for The Financial Times during much of the 1990's before he quit to work on First Tuesday and Moreover, appears to have a unusual ability to spot both talented writers and the subjects they should be writing about.
He says he looks for writers "who haven't had mainstream media experience," and he subscribes to the premise behind "Moneyball," the Michael Lewis book about the Oakland A's baseball team, which only hire athletes who "don't look like athletes" because, well, they are cheaper.
His first pick to edit Gawker, Elizabeth Spiers recently left to work for New York magazine and created a blog for them.
And Gawker's new editor, Choire Sicha, was just signed to write a weekly freelance column for The New York Observer.
While Mr. Denton does not edit the sites himself, he says he does encourage his writers to be "more trashy," jokingly explaining that he comes from "the Felix Dennis school of publishing." (Mr. Felix is the publisher of the young men's magazine Maxim.)
The way Mr. Denton determines the theme of his blogs has less to do with his own personal interests than with the demands of the market, as determined by Google. He relies on Google's AdSense program, which pays Web sites to publish text ads matched to the pages' content, for the bulk of his revenue. As a result, he picks blog subjects based on the rate Google pays for clicks on ads in specific topic areas. Among the topics of blogs he plans to start this year are computer gaming, travel and politics.
He said he hoped that as the number of blogs multiply, he would reach a critical mass of visitors that he would be able to sell to larger advertisers.
"The rise of Google's AdSense and related automatically targeted ad servers really suits narrowly focused blogs," said Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, which uses content from Gizmodo in one of its e-mail newsletters. "It provides a way for niche media and niche advertising to find each other, with virtually no human intervention required."
Whether blogs can ever become truly big businesses, though, is up for debate. Mr. Denton, for one, is trying to talk down the hype, at least for now. "Fantasy No. 1 is that anyone is going to get rich off of this," he said. Mr. Denton insists he does not want to create another venture capital bubble. "I don't want to see some V.C.'s invest idiot money in idiot people at idiot companies," he said.
But Mr. Denton is thinking about how to expand the blog market, perhaps by creating product-focused blogs for major marketers. His next big project is a site called Kinja, which is supposed to be the blog of all blogs, compiling the best of Web log writing from thousands of different blogs.
But the need for Kinja may demonstrate Mr. Denton's biggest obstacle. "Inevitably, the rabbit-like proliferation of blogs may pose problems for Nick," said Mr. Roshan. "The low cost and few barriers that have made blogs an attractive business proposition may turn out to be their undoing, as everyone and their grandmother will soon have a blog."
