Gawker Media Poll

the Deadspin staff pitched $10-15 million as a ballpark for someone to pick them up and start from scratch, without profitability built in

Is Ringer really a warning? The YouTube content is what keeps the lights on. You don't want to read Rob Harvilla on Camila Cabello? I loved the Kate Knibbs story last week about Slava P's coke trafficking arrest. There's a good model there for a Deadspin-esque site to get eyeballs. Obviously Ringer doesn't perform like an ESPN site did but it's employing a lot of people.

A warning about the diminished traffic and influence of trying to pack up an established property for another, yes. It's not about the content - though, yeah, I think most Ringer content is bad outside of the NBA... and inside the NBA if Simmons is directly involved - just that process.

People had been going to Deadspin for 15 years, it was the fill-in if they typed D in their browser - you can never recapture that with a new site. Especially after some time has passed.

the ringer makes its money in podcasting. it's not a cautionary tale per se but i think that a writer's role at a place like that is still complicated and perhaps even precarious. the thing is that the ringer's relationship to podcasting is just really hard to replicate... the main reason their podcast network is so successful in the first place is bcuz simmons himself has been a popular podcaster for over a decade, going back to years before grantland even. there's websites/media companies that work, but they're all pretty sui generis. it's hard to just duplicate a model. one thing that made the death of deadspin particularly sad was not just that it was good, but that it killed off one of the sites whose success was not a model that could be copied.

Maybe Deadspin should try that thing everyone loves where someone waves their hands around and reads/summarizes the article to you in a pop-up window

^ did not go to Deadspin in the two months before it died