Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan may have been the catalysts, but the money is now on the table as Gawker, the ferociously independent news source, has been bought by media giant Univision in a winning $135 million bid at auction.
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Univision’s purchase, which is set to go before a United States bankruptcy judge on Thursday, shows how keen the company is to expand its digital media portfolio and court a millennial audience.
All of this is a result of a lawsuit brought on Terry Bollea, also known as Hulk Hogan, to whom the company lost a $140 million lawsuit, over the publishing of his sex tape, earlier this year. While Gawker is now appealing the decision in the Hogan case, but was forced to file for bankruptcy in order to fund that appeal.
Nick Denton, founder and publisher of Gawker Media.
“I had begun coming out to people I knew, and I planned to continue on my own terms”, Thiel wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece published Monday.
If you’re a traditional media company looking to target Millennials, the fastest way to do so is to acquire a company that already produces the sort of content and reaches the sort of audience you desire. Last year, Denton would say that Gawker Media could command $250 million or more in value. Another similar incident previous year, where an article outed a heterosexually married media executive for seeking a gay escort; the article was removed but two lead editors quit.
Univision has purchased Gawker Media for $135m, according to multiple reports.
Gawker and Denton were influential forces in the growth of online media, developing a direct, conversational and sometimes-slashing style that dispensed with many journalistic conventions and was widely imitated. But First Amendment advocates argue that such a retaliatory lawsuits by the wealthy have a unsafe chilling effect on free speech.
Univision, which owns the largest Spanish-language television network in the United States, has recently been expanding its online holdings.
Univision’s takeover of Gawker solidifies the TV network ” s youth-centric digital strategy, diversifying its portfolio of media assets across a range of demographics.
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Or as Publishers Daily Editor Erik Sass commented in a post at that time: “The two media companies seem at first glance to have precisely nothing to do with each other – and that’s the point”.
