Yahoo spiced up its content offerings today with the
addition of the sometimes foul-language and often randy daily news and
entertainment feeds from five of Gawker Media’s popular blogger sites.
The Gawker sites to be featured on Yahoo are Defamer, a Hollywood gossip and
news page; Gawker, a daily source for Manhattan news media and gossip;
Gizmodo, a technology weblog dedicated to everything related to gadgets,
gizmos, and consumer electronics; Lifehacker, a review of product downloads,
Web sites, and shortcuts to help people save time; and Wonkette, an insider
political scandal sheet.
Yahoo, which will post dozens of stories per day from Gawker Media’s stable
of popular Web sites, says content from the sites will be filtered for
vulgarity.
“Our audience comes to Yahoo for the most compelling media experience on the
Internet, and Gawker Media offers some of the most well-known and
interesting commentary today,” Scott Moore, head of Yahoo news and finance,
said in a statement.
Weblog distribution deals have been on the rise in recent months, as
bloggers often reap the value of increased traffic to their sites, while
larger media outlets enjoy the cache of having hip and irreverent content
often left off mainstream mastheads.
“Gawker Media content expands Yahoo’s non-traditional media library with
unique perspectives that provide intelligent, funny and sometimes
controversial views of the news events of the day,” Moore said of the
licensing agreement.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Last month AOL bought
the Internet’s leading blogging company and Gawker’s biggest competitor,
Weblogs, for approximately $25 million.
The Santa Monica, Calif.-based
Weblogs, which produces a network of Internet sites specializing in “niche”
consumer and trade markets, collects 30 million monthly Web page views and
25 million monthly RSS page views per month.
Yahoo’s addition of Gawker content also follows several recent initiatives
to offer non-traditional media to its audiences. The search giant recently
added grassroots media outlets (blogs and user-contributed photos) to its
News Search tool.
Earlier this year, the company also began offering
content from The Huffington Post, a popular blog and news site operated by
Arianna Huffington, on Yahoo News.
