There will be no more gawking at Gawker.
The muckraking website went dark Monday night after a stunning 13-year run that skewered the rich and powerful in the media industry, Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
It was the last category that led to the site’s demise.
Following a 2007 profile of technology billionaire Peter Thiel that publically outed the Silicon Alley executive as gay, its subject embarked on a decade-long quest for revenge.
Ultimately, he secretly bankrolled a privacy lawsuit brought against Gawker by pro wrestler Hulk Hogan that resulted in a game-ending $140 million verdict against the web site. Hogan, whose real name is Terry Bollea, had sued Gawker after the site published and refused to take down a short clip from a Hogan tape in which the wrestler was seen having sex with the wife of a former friend.
Thiel later told The New York Times: “I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest.”
Thiel also ripped Gawker’s “nasty articles that attacked and mocked people.”
A story on the site Monday noted that it had published about 202,370 posts since its 2003 launch.
SimilarWeb, a third party web analytics provider, noted that Gawker had been averaging about 23 million visits per month as of 2015.
In his final post to Gawker Monday, its founder Nick Denton wrote: “Mockery, of course, is the cheapest and most available tool that the powerless have against the powerful; it has historically been the one thing that they can’t silence.”
Until now.
Following an unsuccessful appeal of the Bollea verdict, the website’s parent company, Gawker Media Group — which will continue to operate other popular sites, including Gizmodo, Jezebel, and Deadspin — was sold to Miami-based Fusion Media for $135 million in mid-August.
Denton slammed Thiel and other tech giants like him that the site once covered in his final Gawker post.
“They are as sensitive to criticism as any other ruling class,” he wrote. “But with the confidence that they can transform and disrupt anything, from government to the press.”
