G/O Media owned and operated several notable websites over the course of its six-year history. None, however, better epitomized the company’s struggles — and eventual demise — better than Deadspin.
On Tuesday, G/O Media announced that it is selling its video game website, Kotaku, leaving it with just one remaining property, The Root, which it also plans to offload. In an epilogue published to the front of the company’s website, CEO Jim Spanfeller acknowledged that G/O Media is “working towards a full wind down,” before reflecting on its brief but eventful run.
That included G/O Media’s time as the owner of Deadspin, which it first purchased from Univision as a part of the company’s formation in 2019. The early portion of G/O Media’s tenure owning Deadspin included constant clashes between the website’s editorial team and management, which included an edict that the once-irreverent sports blog should write “only about sports.”
In response to the directive, Deadspin staffers populated the website’s front page with some of its most popular non-sports stories from the past. That led to the firing of interim editor-in-chief Barry Petchesky, which then resulted in a mass resignation among the site’s writing staff.
Simply put, Deadspin — once considered one of the most influential websites in sports media — was never the same.
In his farewell post, Spanfeller admitted that Deadspin could be considered the “poster child” for the challenges that G/O Media faced while attempting to balance editorial independence and managerial control. Yet despite the struggles, Spanfeller — who received a vote of no confidence from the GMG Union in 2020 — insisted that Deadspin ultimately turned a profit before being sold to the European startup, Lineup Publishing, in 2024.
Writes Spanfeller:
A poster child here might be Deadspin and the early issues we had with the incumbent staff. Who owned the site and who had to make the site work was theoretically not a core factor in what the site reported on nor how it did that reporting. We asked for the slightest of changes, to cover just sports, sports related issues as well as sports adjacent stories. That was perceived as beyond the pale by the legacy team and as such they left en masse. An outcome that the management team certainly did not want. But that said, with a new team which was also feisty to say the least (just ask our IP lawyers) but who stayed within the sports realm, we returned the site to previous traffic levels and made a profit for the first time in many, many years. And, in the end, we sold the site for more than we bought it for.
G/O Media being a private company means we’ll likely never know the financial details of either claim. But if Deadspin did indeed turn a profit prior to last year’s sale, it likely wasn’t due to its traffic, which experienced a sharp decline following the October 2019 staff exodus.
As noted in our June 2023 story titled “Why would anyone want to write for G/O Media?,” Deadspin hovered in the 14-17 million monthly unique visitor range in 2019, according to ComScore. That number dropped to around 717,000 visitors in February 2020 when the site was no longer publishing content, before climbing back to an average of 3.16 million readers by the end of 2021, Deadspin’s first calendar year with a new staff in place. According to Comscore, however, that upward trajectory stalled out in 2022, regressing back to a monthly average of 2.4 million readers and remained in the same range throughout the first half of 2023.
If Spanfeller’s claim is correct, that either means that Deadspin’s traffic bounced back in a meaningful way in the nine months between June 2023 and its March 2024 sale or the company found other revenue streams to help it turn a profit. If nothing else, his claim that the site’s traffic returned to its previous levels is questionable at best.
Either way, Spanfeller has remained steadfast that G/O Media sold Deadspin to Lineup Publishing for more than it originally bought it for (neither price has been disclosed). But while there is plenty in his epilogue that some could take issue with, there’s no disputing that its turbulent time with Deadspin only served as a precursor for the struggles the company would come to face.
About Ben Axelrod
Ben Axelrod is a veteran of the sports media landscape, having most recently worked for NBC's Cleveland affiliate, WKYC. Prior to his time in Cleveland, he covered Ohio State football and the Big Ten for outlets including Cox Media Group, Bleacher Report, Scout and Rivals.