Parting company with Yahoo·
We're letting our content partnership with Yahoo lapse. The bald truth is that the deal, which we announced in November, garnered way more attention than we expected, but less traffic. A few new readers probably discovered Gawker, or one of the other four sites that we syndicated to Yahoo. I doubt many of them stayed. Yahoo has a mass audience; Gawker appeals to a peculiarly coastal, geeky and freaky demographic. And these people are more likely to come to our sites through word of mouth, or blog links, or search engine results, or Digg, not because of a traditional content syndication deal.
By the way, the decision, which was mutual, has little to do with Yahoo's numbers, yesterday, or the delay in improvements to its Overture ad system. We were already placing Google Adsense text links, under relevant posts, on Gizmodo's front page. Encouraged by the performance of this test, we will be rolling out this deeper Adsense integration across other sites.
Finally, yes, Valleywag's persecution of Lloyd Braun, head of Yahoo Media, probably cast a pall over the relationship. But Yahoo execs, while they occasionally made their displeasure known, never pressured us to remove a post. They were considerably more sanguine, at least in public, than their supposedly worldly counterparts in traditional media.
