G/O Media, Great Hill Partners’ roll-up of former Gawker titles, is ending the way many of this decade’s digital media consolidation plays have: asset by asset.
Last week’s sale of Kotaku to Switzerland-based Keleops leaves only The Root on the auction block and closes a six-year chapter that never delivered the post-Gawker “hockey stick” growth of the initial thesis.
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In 2019, Great Hill paid “much less” than the $135 million Univision had spent three years earlier to acquire Gizmodo Media Group (Gawker’s post-bankruptcy assets).
The turnaround plan was relatively standard: install new leadership, streamline adtech, and cross-sell audiences. Industry veteran Jim Spanfeller, brought in as chief executive, said at the time that G/O Media was “in an ideal position to capitalize on this dynamic.”
Following last week’s Kotaku sale, Spanfeller published a ‘G/O Media Epilogue’ with a more beaten-down tone.
“It became clear to our investors that it was time to move on,” Spanfeller wrote, adding that Great Hill “has been a very good partner” and that his note was “in no way a suggestion that Great Hill was in some way acting like a rapacious private equity firm.”
Despite never achieving the desired growth, Spanfeller says that the deal at least avoided some of the worst outcomes seen at peers. “We can state that, even before completing all of the transactions, we will exit having increased shareholder value. A feat that few other companies in our space can claim.”
“Just look at the issues surrounding companies like Vice [backers including TPG; taken over by Fortress-led lender group], BuzzFeed [trading down nearly 95 percent from its de-SPAC price], BusinessInsider [owned by KKR-backed Axel Springer] and Vox [backers including General Atlantic and Accel; last raised at a valuation 50 percent below its prior round] to name only a few.”
Spanfeller blamed G/O’s outcome on pandemic-era ad recessions, the dominance of Google and Meta, and prolonged battles with writers’ unions.
In practice, programmatic CPMs never recovered, Facebook referral traffic collapsed, and early experiments with AI-generated articles—touted by Spanfeller as evidence that “innovation was always a constant”—only ended up alienating readers and embarrassing the brand.
Frequent public infighting between Spanfeller and various editorial teams didn’t help.
At Deadspin, one of the platform’s flagship assets, staff quit en masse in 2019 after being instructed to pull back on editorial commentary and just “stick to sports.” Similar clashes at Jezebel, Gizmodo, and Kotaku culminated in a multi-site strike in 2022.
After their departure, the former Deadspin team regrouped to found an independent reboot of the outlet, called Defector. In their 2020 post-mortem, the group blamed G/O Media’s middling trajectory on Spanfeller’s overly aggressive monetization and steady brand dilution across the portfolio.
Spanfeller moved through the office like a blunt object, always more interested in how to further monetize the G/O Media sites than in the sites themselves. In an early meeting Spanfeller had with the editorial staff, he told us that his plan was to more than double G/O Media’s annual revenue within a year … all of the G/O Media sites were bearing the consequences of Spanfeller’s plan for profitability: they had become so choked with advertisements (including autoplay, sound-on video ads) that they had become nearly non-functional for readers, who were flooding editors’ inboxes with complaints.
The situation never improved much, and Great Hill started its piecemeal exit process for G/O’s publications more than two years ago.
Lifehacker went to Ziff Davis in 2023; Jezebel, The A.V. Club, and Quartz followed in 2023–25; The Onion, Deadspin, Jalopnik, and now Kotaku were each carved out.
One final G/O property remains. Black culture and news outlet The Root is still searching for a buyer, at which point Great Hill’s latest digital media foray will come to a close.
Along the way, the former Deadspin team at Defector has been gleefully tracking events, publishing articles with titles like ‘Jim Spanfeller Is A Third-Rate Parasite’ and yesterday’s triumphant ‘Jim Spanfeller Somehow Worse At Writing Than Running A Media Company’.