“ But wasn’t the Web supposed to be all about niches? - Yes, that was the original idea, and it was wrong. Felix Salmon, who’s now at Reuters, wrote a good piece about the end of micropublishing, which I think was actually triggered by our decision to fold Valleywag and Defamer into Gawker. His point was that micropublishing hadn’t played out and that the reason it hadn’t was because of that ComScore chart I referred to earlier. That chart is why sites die. The major agencies won’t even look at you if you’re under 10 million. I mean, sure, you can get advertisers. You can have a high-end fashion site and have direct contact with the brands and get money directly from Marc Jacobs. But you won’t get anything from the agencies. And the big money is still spent through the agencies. So if you want the big money, you have to provide the scale they need.”
