hank you, Paris Hilton," exclaimed Nick Denton last week as traffic flowed in to his new Web venture, a pornography Web log called Fleshbot.
Mr. Denton, whose company, Gawker Media, also publishes the gossip site Gawker, had just received what to him was the Internet equivalent of gold: he scored one of the first copies of the now-infamous sex tape of Paris Hilton, an heir to the hotel fortune.
The timing of his voyeuristic coup could not have been better. Just hours before receiving the video by e-mail from a "deeply buried source" last Monday morning, Mr. Denton, 37, had introduced Fleshbot, which might best be described as an erudite pornography site, with the same kind of catty writing and timely links that have made Gawker a must-read for New York's gossip crowd. (The entry with the link to the Hilton video, which was available free, read: "Her eyes glint like a hungry cat's, and she's giving her partner that Bridget Fonda-esque, naughty half-smile look of satisfaction - or too much Red Bull and vodka consumption.")
In its first week, Fleshbot recorded more than one million page views - slowing to a crawl at one point because of too much demand - outdoing Gawker, which Mr. Denton started last year.
Gawker (www.gawker.com) has become a standout among Web logs, or blogs, which emerged several years ago as idiosyncratic online journals by individuals posting their musings and links to other sites.
Mr. Denton, a British entrepreneur and self-styled "play magazine editor," is trying to turn blogging - once only the province of hobbyists - into a profitable, ad-supported business. But Gawker Media is not exactly gushing cash just yet.
Mr. Denton says his blogs, which also include a gadget site called Gizmodo, "are businesses with, at least for the moment, the turnover of a lemonade stand." He says each site brings in several thousand dollars a month in revenue.
But that may be just the beginning. Mr. Denton is planning to roll out a dozen more blogs in the next year, though he insists he is in no rush, and does not expect, to turn his lemonade stand into a money machine overnight. He is a 1990's dot-com millionaire who sold an events company called First Tuesday, which brought together entrepreneurs and venture capitalists at gatherings, right before the bursting of the bubble. "I'm kind of embarrassed," he said. "All this blogging is kind of paid for by the cocktail parties of the boom."
But all his blogging is catching the attention of millions of visitors a month and, increasingly, the interests of venture capitalists and New York's media elite - despite Mr. Denton's best efforts to at least feign a desire to remain under the radar. (At first he said he did not want to be interviewed for this article, and when Gawker was mentioned in passing in this newspaper and also in New York magazine earlier this month, the site declared, "Gawker: So Totally Over.")
"When I first met Nick, he showed me this amazing new thing he called blogging," said Jeff Jarvis, president and creative director of Advance.net, the online arm of Advance Publications. "I frankly had no idea what he was showing me. Only later did I understand the significance of this: Tying history's easiest, cheapest publishing tool to history's best distribution network, the Internet, would have tremendous impact on media."
Mr. Jarvis, who invested Advance Publications' money in Moreover Technologies, another company started by Mr. Denton, added: "He recognized that what sets Web logging apart from other media is only how incredibly inexpensive it is."
Indeed, unlike traditional publications or online magazines like Slate, blogs do not require a stable of writers to produce much original content. Most blogs consist of annotated links to material on other sites, with the blog editor playing the role of online master of ceremonies.
Mr. Denton's blogging venture runs on a shoestring. He employs three writers, one for each blog, who "are not paid much." And he depends almost solely on good buzz for marketing. His tiny advertising budget consists of spending several hundred dollars to buy ads tied to certain keywords on Google's search engine, like "Anna Wintour," so that when users search for the names of media figures, the results include links to Mr. Denton's blogs.
