G/O Media, the digital media publisher that once owned sites like Jezebel and Deadspin, announced on Wednesday that it was winding down its operations and selling off one of its last properties, the video game website Kotaku.
G/O Media, which is owned by the private equity firm Great Hill Partners, once owned a collection of websites that had belonged to the Gawker Media blog universe and The Onion. But it has slowly been shedding its holdings. With the sale of Kotaku, only one website remains: The Root, which covers Black culture and news.
G/O Media’s chief executive, Jim Spanfeller, said in a statement on Wednesday that “it became clear to our investors that it was time to move on,” alluding to a series of challenges that the digital media industry has faced in recent years.
Publishers have been battling for advertising against tech giants like Google and Meta, while generative A.I. is reshaping the media landscape. Investors don’t see a promise of growth in digital publishing in the way they did before the pandemic.
Mr. Spanfeller was quick to say Great Hill had been “a very good partner” and had “never weighed in on editorial direction.”
“This is in no way a suggestion that Great Hill was in some way acting like a rapacious private equity firm,” he said.
In April, G/O Media sold the business news site Quartz and The Inventory, a commerce site, to Redbrick, a Canadian software company. In recent years, it also sold off Jalopnik, The Onion, Jezebel, Lifehacker, Deadspin and the A.V. Club. Mr. Spanfeller said that he was still working to find a buyer for The Root, but that G/O Media “will exit having increased shareholder value.”
Mr. Spanfeller, who was frequently at odds with the staff at his publications, also used his letter to attack unions.
“In a number of ways unions have added value to editorial employees’ positions during a time of major change,” he wrote. “But in many more ways the core methods that unions work with (or rather against) companies working hard to change with the times is counterproductive to both their membership as well as the companies as a whole.”
Keleops, a European tech media company, bought Kotaku in an all-cash deal, Keleops’s chief executive, Jean-Guillaume Kleis, said. He declined to disclose the financial details of the sale. The company, which is based in Switzerland, bought the tech site Gizmodo from G/O Media last year.
“We want to build an international media group that is focusing on tech in the very broad sense, and gaming is, I would say, a natural part of that universe,” Mr. Kleis said in an interview.
Kotaku was founded in 2004 as part of what was Gawker Media, and was acquired by G/O Media in 2019. Mr. Kleis said that he had agreed to keep Kotaku’s entire staff as part of the deal, as the company did with the Gizmodo acquisition, and that Keleops did not have any plans “in the short run” to make major changes to its content.
“They have an iconic and very different voice in the gaming industry, and this is extremely important to keep for our loyal readers over the past 20 years,” Mr. Kleis said. “And we’ll try to make it even better.”
Mr. Kleis said that the purchase of Gizmodo in June 2024 had gone smoothly and that the company would soon introduce a new version of the site. He said Keleops had doubled the audience of Gizmodo in the United States in the past year and quadrupled it globally. According to Comscore data from May, Gizmodo had eight million unique visitors in the United States and 15 million from the rest of the world.
Keleops has offices in Paris and New York, as well as Zug, Switzerland. Along with Gizmodo, it runs the consumer tech sites Journal du Geek, 01net, Presse Citron and iPhon, and has more than 40 million monthly unique visitors across those sites, according to a news release.
Mr. Kleis said he was continuing to look at other acquisition targets in the United States, as part of an expansion into the country.
Katie Robertson covers the media industry for The Times. Email: [email protected]
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