In a nutshell, the new feature — which is already live on Valleywag, and will be expanded to the other Gawker Media titles over the next few weeks — gives both Gawker authors and readers the ability to filter comments based on the writers and commenters they follow, or whose content they have “liked” or given a star to. So readers can click on Denton’s name and see not only the posts he has written, but also a specific selection of comments that he has chosen to show, from commenters he follows via the platform.

Readers get their own view of the comments

Denton said in an interview on Monday that what Gawker is offering is something similar to Twitter’s “conversation view,” where readers can easily see the back-and-forth between people they follow, and thereby cut through the noise of miscellaneous trolls or attention-seekers. In a way, the site is enlisting its readers as comment moderators, and giving them a chance to curate their own view by choosing the ones they see as valuable:

“It’s a bit of a balancing act, but we’re trying to allow for intelligent discussion to take place more easily — to make it possible for people to have an intelligent conversation without being distracted by smart-asses or general trolling.”

Although Denton is often portrayed as a ruthless operator interested only in juicing traffic to his sites, he said the larger point of the new Kinja feature — and of the platform as a whole — is to help level the playing field between “professional” writers and the informed sources that their posts are based on, something he has been trying to do since he started Gawker. The end game is to ultimately arrive at the truth about a specific topic or issue, in part through the back-and-forth discussion by writers, readers and participants.

“It’s not just about levelling the playing field between commenters or readers and writers — we want sources as well, we want them to be able to participate in these discussions. And the principle is that in order to be able to achieve the potential of the internet we need to harness the collective intelligence of the readership.”

A network of blog neighborhoods

Earlier features that were added to Kinja gave readers their own blog on the Gawker platform, with their own custom URL, where they can repost content that they like from Gawker blogs — and even allows them to rewrite the headline and description on those posts, or add new images. In some cases, Denton says, this remixing process produces better content: so a Gawker post about Bryan Goldberg’s new venture was reblogged with a better photo, and that version wound up being republished on Valleywag.

In an ideal world, the Gawker founder said, the re-blogging function — which was modelled in part on the way Tumblr functions — and the comment-filtering function combine to create a “city of networked neighborhoods” in which both staff writers at Gawker and readers set up their own streams of curated posts and comments, and other readers can choose where to put their attention (BuzzFeed has also given readers the ability to post their own content that sits alongside that from its staff writers.

It’s not just for readers, however: Denton said that this new approach could also change the way that Gawker itself functions, allowing editors to sort through both staff content and reader-contributed content and filtered discussions and select the best. And the higher-signal the conversations are, the more appealing those posts will be for advertisers — not to mention the fact that advertisers can use the Kinja reblogging to publish their own content as well.

Comments can be saved, says Denton

Denton admits that in addition to his other motives for making these changes — the desire to improve the quality of online discussion, and the desire to drive more traffic and revenue to Gawker’s network — he feels compelled to try and fix internet comments because so many people have said that it simply can’t be done, and have given up on comments altogether:

“I love doing things that people think are quixotic and pointless — there is no greater joy. People thought the same thing about early blogging, all my journalist friends said it was pointless. It gives me the greatest satisfaction to prove people like that wrong.”

Denton said that what he is really trying to do is incorporate the lessons and innovations produced by non-media or alternative outlets like Twitter or Instagram or Medium. And while Kinja has cost about $10 million to roll out over the past two years, the Gawker founder says he has the luxury of being able to experiment with such features because the company is privately held and is “significantly profitable.” Denton said the new platform was financed completely out of Gawker’s operating cash flow.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Christian Scholtz Shutterstock / wellphoto

The triumvirate behind the project — former Time Inc. editor-in-chief John Huey, former New York Times editor of digital Martin Nisenholtz and Paul Sagan, executive chairman of Akamai Technologies — talked to 61 people, in an effort sponsored by the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School. All of the videos and transcripts are available at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab (where director Josh Benton created a well-designed and responsive website that is a great example of what online publishing can do).

The riptide metaphor absolves everyone of blame

The list of interview subjects for Digital Riptide includes a fairly large number of technology and media-industry heavyweights, from Google chairman Eric Schmidt and Sir Tim Berners-Lee to New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte — and to give the project full credit, there are also some interviews with new-media big thinkers and doers in the package as well, including our own Om Malik, Gawker Media founder Nick Denton, BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti and indie blogger Andrew Sullivan.

As the site explains, the title of the project came from the idea that the arrival of digital technology and the disruption that it caused in the media business was like a riptide — in other words, a powerful and largely unforeseen force that caught most of the swimmers in the traditional industry by surprise and made them more or less powerless to resist its clutches.

“When successful, pre-digital players who had learned to swim out to sea and return safely with confidence and regularity found themselves over time confronting a stronger and stronger force that made it more and more difficult to get back to shore. And just like a school of swimmers caught in a real riptide, even some of the best-prepared and forward-thinking media companies were swept away no matter how hard they tried to survive.”

This is a very appealing metaphor, because it largely absolves anyone who was involved in the media from any blame for failing to see the writing on the wall or failing to move quickly enough to change their behavior or their corporate culture. How could they be expected to do so? It was an act of God or an act of nature that was unavoidable — one which no one could possibly have expected. They did their best, but in the end they were powerless.

There were those who saw it coming

But is this true? Disruption guru Clay Christensen, also associated with Harvard, has written about how industries — including the car-manufacturing business and the steel industry — have failed to adapt because they didn’t appreciate just how disruptive new entrants or new technologies would be. And it’s arguable that the media industry in the 1990s and early 2000s also failed to appreciate just how disruptive the web would be to their business and to journalism in general. Should we blame them for that?

I think we should blame them a little, and here’s why: because there were senior people in the industry who saw the disruption coming — saw it clearly, appreciated the implications, and talked about the potential damage. These weren’t voices crying in the wilderness, but fairly powerful players. To take just one example, there was Knight Ridder excecutive Kathy Yates, who ran the company’s digital unit, and eventually grew frustrated with the industry and moved on to Women.com and then CBSMarketwatch. Here’s what she told the project:

“I just didn’t see that there was much of a future in a limited, walled garden online approach. It was just too difficult. The penetration was too thin; there was nothing about it that said to me that it would ever be a successful enterprise… I think what really was so striking to me about the Internet was the removal of boundaries. The newspaper business, as I experienced it, was always full of boundaries. It was very limited in so many ways… the Internet was just so gloriously, really free, of those constraints.”

Why weren’t they listened to?

Here’s another example: Betsy Morgan, a former senior executive with CBSNews.com who eventually left the traditional media business and became CEO of The Huffington Post. In her interview, she talks about seeing an early version of Google Trends, and how she believed this could help change the television news business by giving producers an idea of what the stories of interest to viewers were. She took some Google engineers around to show the feature to senior news staff and was rebuffed.

“These Google engineers were fabulous and smart and articulate. I got shut down. I was told that, had I not learned anything at the time I had been at CBS News? Had I not learned that this was not the way journalism was done, and that these funny, skinny kids from Google had nothing to say about the business, about the creation of journalism? I have to say, that was sort of a breaking point for me.”

Those are just two examples. And there are plenty of excellent interviews and worthwhile perspectives in the project, including Knight-Ridder executive Tony Ridder — who perhaps more than any other senior player in the media industry saw the change coming and tried to adapt his business to it, and ultimately failed — as well as David Graves, the Reuters executive who spearheaded the company’s landmark investment in Yahoo, and plenty of relevant insights from Nick Denton, Jonah Peretti of BuzzFeed and others.

Unfortunately, the over-arching impression is that no one was capable of altering these events — not even a host of well-intentioned and powerful senior executives in the media business like Gerald Levin and Arthur Sulzberger. And that ignores the fact that people like Morgan and Yates (and Ridder) saw the change coming and realized the implications on a fundamental level, and were not listened to. In other words, more companies could have tried harder to swim with the current instead of being sucked under.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Cheryl Casey

Is there a case to be made that Denton is the most disruptive force in online media right now? I think there is.

As an example, take the latest features that Gawker is rolling out for its Kinja discussion platform, which has been steadily evolving from just a commenting system into a bottom-up publishing method — one that gives readers far more power than they have on virtually any other media site, except possibly Reddit. As Denton told the Nieman Lab earlier this year:

“Publishing should be a collaboration between authors and their smartest readers — and at some point the distinction should become meaningless.”

Readers can rewrite Gawker headlines

As Adrienne LaFrance noted in a post at the Nieman Lab, the new features will allow any Gawker reader to take blog posts from the network’s various sites (Gawker, Gizmodo, Jalopnik, etc.) and rewrite them, or at least create a new headline and introductory paragraph. In effect, it turns Gawker readers into editors and aggregators who can re-blog or share posts with their own headlines and lede paragraphs — since Kinja also gives everyone who comments their own blog, another Denton innovation.

These rewritten Kinja posts can also get promoted to the front page of the Kinja network, if their headlines are good enough. In a sense, Denton is structuring Gawker so that the blog posts and re-blogged posts produced by readers are competing with the output of his own writers and editors for attention — and the result is something approaching a meritocracy of sorts, where the best content (theoretically) rises to the top.

And that doesn’t just mean pageviews for readers: Gawker is well known for hiring its best commenters and making them part of its permanent staff.

More than just about anyone else, Denton is blurring the line between readers or commenters and the professional writers and editors he pays to generate content. Some publishers and websites can’t even bring themselves to dignify comments with a response, let alone promote commenters or hire them to work for the website (although The Atlantic has also done this). Many seem happy to hand their comments over to Facebook, and some argue that comments should be done away with entirely because they serve no useful purpose other than attracting trolls.

The Day My Finger Hovered Over The "Turn Off All Comments Forever" Button.—
Choire Sicha (@Choire) July 26, 2013

Blurring the line between writer and reader

In contrast, Denton has consistently said — as he told me during an interview prior to the launch of Kinja last year — that he wants to level the playing field as much as possible between comments and the stories or posts that trigger them. The reason he decided to launch Gawker in the first place was that he realized, while working for the Financial Times, that the commentary in the newsroom about an event was often far more interesting and relevant than the actual story itself.

Part of the idea behind Kinja is to use the hyper-commenting/blogging platform as a way of offering something valuable to advertisers as well, as Denton described in our earlier interview: a kind of sponsored discussion that would allow brands to meet and engage with smart commenters around an issue, in much the same way that innovative sites like Techdirt are trying to find ways of building bridges between their reader communities and the advertisers who want to reach them.

Denton isn’t the only one who is doing innovative things in publishing, of course — Techdirt and Talking Points Memo are both trying to redefine how they engage with (and appeal to the wallets of) their readers, and Sullivan’s Daily Dish and Marco Arment’s The Magazine are also interesting. But no one is putting their money behind Rosen’s “people formerly known as the audience” principle the way Denton is, and it’s fascinating to watch.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Thinkstock

Hiring a staffer from the comments isn’t something that came out of left field for Jalopnik: in fact, the site’s editor, Matt Hardigree, more or less telegraphed his intention to start doing this in February, when he launched the new version of the site’s comment system, which is based on Gawker’s proprietary Kinja platform — a model that essentially gives every commenter their own blog where their discussions are highlighted. As Hardigree put it in a note about the redesign:

You’ll also be able to republish articles from our site (and eventually all Gawker sites) and we’ll be able to do the same. If we do republish something you created you’ll get the byline, the credit, and it’ll be clear where it came from. When we look for the next generation of writers for our site, and other sites, we’ll be looking at who does well in Kinja.

Comments as “a farm system” for a blog

Hardigree said in a blog post about Ballaban’s hiring that while Jalopnik and other Gawker sites have hired commenters to be writers before — including Ryan Tate, now a writer at Wired, who was hired (ironically) after he trashed a job ad posted by Gawker — this is the first time it has taken someone from the pool of Kinja-based commenter/bloggers. The Jalopnik editor said he was “particularly impressed with [Ballaban's] passionate Suzuki eulogy and evaluation of American cars.”

In a discussion we had with Nick Denton before the launch of the Kinja platform, the Gawker Media founder said one of his goals for the new system was to even the playing field between commenters and writers — to make it easier to highlight good content from readers, and give that the same prominence as writing from the actual staff of the network’s blogs. In a note earlier this year, he called it a “a farm system for the main Gawker teams.”

Other media outlets that have hired commenters include political blog network Daily KOS and The Atlantic, where Yoni Appelbaum was such a frequent and eloquent commenter on writer Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog that the magazine asked him to be an occasional contributor and then eventually hired him. Coates’ blog is known for its thoughtful comments — so much so that the Atlantic writer actually thanked his commenters when he won a National Magazine Award for his writing.

Critics such as Buzzfeed writer John Herrman argue that there is little value in reader comments, and some high-profile bloggers have stopped allowing them. But blogs such as Coates’ and that of Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson (where at least one startup, Engagio, was born out of a discussion on his blog) show that there can be value in comments when a writer or a site takes an interest in engaging with readers. And in some cases, it can even turn into a job.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Tang Yan Song

It should probably come as no surprise that Gawker Media is in the latter camp, since founder Nick Denton has a penchant for zigging while others are zagging, and is more than happy to rip up much of his existing network in order to try something new. The latest new thing is the Kinja discussion platform, which Denton talked about with me last year just before it launched — describing it as the core of the Gawker empire’s future. The latest version of the platform was just rolled out to users at Jalopnik.

Every commenter now becomes a blogger

As Tim Carmody at The Verge describes in a post on the new features, the platform essentially turns every commenter into a blogger. Prior to the latest change, readers had a profile page that showed their latest contributions, but now they have what amounts to a full-fledged blog with publishing ability — complete with their own custom address at Kinja.com. And editor Matt Hardigree says that the site, and by extension other Gawker sites, will be looking at the comments as a source of content and even future hires:

“If you want, you’ll also be able to republish articles from our site (and eventually all Gawker sites) and we’ll be able to do the same. If we do republish something you created you’ll get the byline, the credit, and it’ll be clear where it came from. When we look for the next generation of writers for our site, and other sites, we’ll be looking at who does well in Kinja.”

It’s worth noting that Gawker already has a history of hiring writers from its comment section, something that the political blog network Daily Kos has also done a number of times. And it’s not just blogs: Yoni Appelbaum, a PhD candidate in history, commented so intelligently on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ posts at The Atlantic that he was eventually made a guest blogger.

Denton’s plan with Kinja isn’t just to create platforms for Gawker readers to hold forth on whatever they wish — the new system is also designed to function as a potential marketing vehicle, with advertisers and brands encouraged to participate (and possibly even sponsor) discussions that begin in the comments on a story. This is just one of a number of revenue-generating experiments that Gawker is rolling out over the next little while, Denton says.

Others also want to turn readers into bloggers

And Gawker isn’t the only new-media entity that is trying to reinvent reader contributions: The Verge, which is published by Vox Media, has turned its discussion forums into content hubs of their own, and often highlights them on the front page (Note: Vox Media founder Jim Bankoff will be speaking at our paidContent Live conference on April 17 in New York).

The question-and-answer site Quora, meanwhile, has launched something that is like an amalgam of Gawker’s approach and The Verge’s: the site recently turned its reader forums into blogs — which means that every contributor to those forums now has a blog page. And as my colleague Jeff Roberts recently described, The Huffington Post has launched a “Conversations” feature that gives popular discussion threads their own webpage.

In a sense, these efforts are just an evolution of the approach that the Huffington Post took when it first launched, which was to give almost anyone who wanted it the ability to publish a blog post. Will these new players produce anything valuable, or just a lot of sound and fury?

Images courtesy of Flickr users Jeremy King and Pew Center

Slate’s latest incarnation is as a data-driven social-media beast.  The site thinks it can use viral wizardry to spray smart writing around the internet and, at the same time, finally earn a profit from being perspicuous. The money question has become pressing because Slate, despite its years as a high-brow conversation starter, has yet to show it can survive without the largesse of a corporate mothership.

So will Slate’s third act pan out? Here’s a look at how its brain trust is approaching data, technology and the evolving ethics of advertising.

Top drawer or traffic whore? Stats and story selection

On a cold January afternoon, I met editor-in-chief of the Slate Group, Jacob Weisberg, and Slate editor David Plotz in the former’s airy corner office on Morton Street in New York’s West Village. The office has large windows and shelves of hardcovers, including Weisberg’s exposition “The Bush Tragedy.”

The men were busy. Weisberg was en route to Davos, while Plotz had ducked out from answering questions on the online discussion forum Reddit. But both wanted to make the case that Slate has what it takes to survive in the age of analytics. “We rely on data, not intuition” said Weisberg. “The big cultural change at Slate is that it’s moved from being a site driven by instinct to a site driven by evidence.”

The remark comes as a rebuttal to earlier observations that Slate relied on creaky technology even as its competitors shot by it with state-of-the-art tools. The New York Observer in 2010, for instance, talked to members of Slate’s staff and concluded that the site’s tech was “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.”

Weisberg says those days are done and that technology is at the center of the editorial operation. He points to a new Silicon Valley-style product team and a doubling in the amount of “sideways” readers from social media in the last year as proof that Slate has gotten religion on the analytics front.

Weisberg says Nick Denton of Gawker and Jonah Peretti of BuzzFeed have been inspirations in the push for better analytics. The two viral media evangelists have shaken up publishing by using social media metrics to judge what stories to promote. (Peretti will be speaking at paidContent Live in April.)

But if Slate turns to audience activity to inform its story choice, does this also mean pandering? “We have written traffic-whorey stories here and there,” admits Plotz. But these efforts haven’t been particularly successful, he says. Instead, he credits editorial initiatives like “Bad Astronomy” (a feature for science nerds) with drawing new regular readers to Slate.

In this regard, Slate is like other high-minded publications navigating a tough, even contradictory mission. On one hand, they promise smart and independent ideas; on the other, they’re heeding social media metrics that could tug them to the lowest common denominator. While news sites like BuzzFeed cut their teeth on silly cat photos only to climb up the intellectual and media food chain, it’s unclear whether this process can work in the opposite direction.

So far, Slate appears to be threading the needle by growing its readership, while also publishing thought-provoking pieces (like this one about Palestinian versus Israeli textbooks). Slate says December 2012 unique visitors increased 33% percent from a year ago; meanwhile, comScore stats show Slate is faring well against other ideas publications. Here’s a chart that shows how they compare (note QZ and theAtlanticWire are part of the theAtlantic.com) :

Paywalls and pettifogging

The buoyant numbers are good news, of course, but do they mean Slate is finally in a position to make money? In 2010, Plotz admitted that Slate was not profitable. Like nearly every other digital publication, Slate had discovered the hard way that great writing and a loyal readership are not the same as a business plan.

Since then, many publishers have followed the lead of the New York Times and begun to charge for access to all or portions of their digital content. These so-called paywalls have gained acceptance after being a contentious issue for years — in part because an early effort by Slate to implement one in 1998 didn’t work out.

Slate recently floated the idea of a future “membership” scheme for some readers, but Weisberg is adamant it won’t involve charging for content. The topic is sensitive enough to have produced a bizarre Twitter spectacle in which Weisberg’s Mr. Fox avatar berated a respected Forbes reporter as a “pettifogger” (and worse):

@jeffbercovici Jeff, that story doesn't say that! It calls membership a "model," not a "pay model." Quit pettifogging.—
Jacob Weisberg (@jacobwe) December 14, 2012

So what exactly does the membership involve? Weisberg didn’t elaborate beyond saying it won’t be unveiled until at least the end of the year and that it will be “more akin to a public radio-type membership model — you give a contribution and in return you get benefits.”

As Slate hashes out these details behind the scenes, it’s also trying to cultivate another revenue stream, in the form of an expanded events business. These include loose mixers that let readers mingle with Slate writers; Weisberg says more than 700 people recently bought tickets for one of its “gab-fests” in Washington. Slate is also hosting small, more formal events hosted by advertisers. One example is a UBS-hosted panel at which Weisberg hosted a discussion on exports with political poohbahs.

Other media outlets have run into ethical challenges with custom events like this — most notably the Washington Post, which in 2009 proposed hosting private “salon events” at the publisher’s house for powerbrokers and journalists. It sparked a newsroom revolt, and the paper ditched the idea before it ever became a reality. Weisberg says Slate, which is independent but shares a corporate parent with the Washington Post, won’t run into similar problems because its events are all public and on the record.

All this still doesn’t answer the question of whether Slate is now profitable. Asked directly, Weisberg said he can’t say because of Sarbanes-Oxley disclosure rules that require companies like the Washington Post Co. to disclose material information through broad public channels.

Ads, yes – but not for the Church of Scientology

Digital publications these days need multiple revenue streams to survive, but their core remains advertising. And here Slate, which has recently built up its own sales force outside of the Post, and others face the same dilemma: an increasing amount of web traffic comes in through mobile devices (about 30% now, and 50% by 2014 is probably a safe bet) but ad rates are low and no one is sure what to do about that.

“I don’t think we’ve figured out anything other people haven’t,” says Weisberg. “You have a rapidly expanding audience but CPM’s that are much lower. The key is distinguishing how and when people are using different types of mobile devices.  Between tablet and mobile, those two will diverge rapidly over time. Tablet ads will become more valuable while handsets gravitate to a performance model.”

While publishers wait for the right mobile ad models to emerge, many are seizing on so-called “native advertising” as the secret to juicing ad prices. It’s debatable whether it’s really new but the basic idea is to produce ads that mimic the editorial content around it – ads that resemble nearby stories, tweets, pictures, etc. It may or not be novel, but for now it is clear that native advertising can go horribly wrong such as when the Atlantic printed a “story” about the Church of Scientology replete with gushing “reader” comments about the cult’s virtues.

Weisberg says the Atlantic tripped up by violating three principles: printing ad that confuse readers; tampering with the editorial process; and accepting an ad from someone the publication shouldn’t have done dealt with in the first place. “They are enemies of free speech, they are persecutors of journalists, they’re litigious. They’re a crazy cult who’s made life hell for journalists who’ve tried to do their job. Why do business with them at all?”

In terms of Slate’s own advertising, the publication says revenue in 2012 grew 26 percent from the previous year. Its advertisers include , most recently, Coke, Lexus and Samsung. As for the ad opportunities offered by aggregation tools like Flipboard, Weisberg is skeptical and says they are “too passive” and less useful now that “Twitter has cracked the news personalization process.”

Slate has also built a strong lineup of videos and podcasts that Weisberg says are lucrative for the site. Slate is now producing nine separate podcasts, some of which rate highly on iTunes; one episode of the show Lexicon Valley recently notched up 650,000 downloads. Slate would not disclose how much ads, which are read by show hosts, bring in but said “advertisers pay some of the highest rates in the industry” for the podcasts.

This podcast and other non-print revenue will help determine whether Slate can join an increasingly data-driven media world while still remaining an influential liberal publication. While the verdict is still out, Slate’s confidence remains high.

“We have the brain of the New York Times and the body of BuzzFeed,” said Weisberg as he prepared to dash off to Switzerland – where he would later tweet, “Wish Pussy Riot was in Davos instead of so many Russian oligarchs & kleptocrats.”

(Images by Slate and Kletr via Shutterstock)

According to the memo, which Advertising Age has published in full, the former head of Gawker’s sponsored content business — which includes the sponsored conversations that Denton launched last year as part of the network’s new Kinja discussion platform — has left Gawker to run his own digital marketing firm, and former Conde Nast ad sales manager Andrew Gorenstein is taking over:

“We’re reaching for 40 percent revenue growth this year, an acceleration from 26 percent in 2012. We had six clients spend over $1M with us last year. Andrew’s new threshold is $5M. In recognition of Andrew’s success, he is being promoted to Chief Revenue Officer, responsible for traditional advertising, our content work for clients and the exploding e-commerce business.”

Denton said last year that ecommerce would be a focus for the company — noting that it was one of the original business models for Gawker but “we didn’t have the scale then to make it work” — but his latest memo makes it clear that the network is going full steam ahead in that direction. Gawker has posted a number of job listings for what it calls “commerce specialists” for sites like Kotaku (devoted to video games) and the female-focused site Jezebel.

Gawker is looking to hire “commerce specialists”

The job listings describe the position as “a new type of service journalism” that includes “everything from posts about the cheapest deal on something our readers need to introducing them to new things they’ve never seen,” and notes that Gawker will be deriving revenue from those posts (if you’re interested in alternative methods of monetization for media, we’re going to be discussing that on a number of panels at our paidContent Live conference in New York on April 17). As the listing describes it:

“Your beat is helping readers buy things. You’ll be delivering content about products that Kotaku readers know, love, or should own. You’ll have both a daily writing assignment and the freedom to pursue your own content ideas. If you’re interested in things like deal forums, coupon codes, giving your friends product advice, and Amazon.com, you’ll use all of those as inspiration to create your own new commerce content product.”

Gawker’s move towards what might be called “commerce journalism” (a term Denton says he doesn’t like using) is just part of the broader trend within a number of digital-media entities of trying to expand their monetization methods away from the declining banner ad business. Sites like BuzzFeed and Gawker are promoting their sponsored content offerings as the solution — although some see that approach as an ethical minefield and point to examples of poor judgment like The Atlantic‘s recent widely criticized Scientology feature.

In a sense, Gawker’s move is just another variation on “native advertising,” which tries to make ad-related content look as much like a site’s traditional fare as possible. Whether the network runs into Atlantic-style problems with this new type of service journalism or advertorial remains to be seen.

This post was updated on February 15 to clarify that the term “commerce journalism” is not one that Nick Denton uses to describe what Gawker is doing with its affiliate link posts.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Shutterstock / Gl0ck

At one end of the debate are skeptics who think comment sections are cesspools of trolls and cretins. At the other end are publishers like Gawker’s Nick Denton and New York magazine who believe reader contributions should be a core part of their editorial strategy.

Are readers who look at comments worth more than regular readers?

It’s no surprise that Disqus is in the “reader comments are great” camp — after all, the company not only sells commenting tools but is also building up a second line of business dedicated to turning comments into a forum for advertisers . The service, called “Promoted Discovery,” does this by perching links to paid-for content right next to reader comments. It’s already appearing in the comment sections of sites like Mens Health and the Observer and it looks like this:

As you can see above, the tool lets a website surface its own content on the left side while selling space in the right hand “recommended for you” box. In trying to tap this market, Disqus is competing with market leader Outbrain which also helps publishers and advertisers buy and sell web traffic.

Disqus’s big pitch to advertisers is that someone who takes the time to read the reader comments of a story is likely to be passionate about the topic — and more likely to click on, buy or otherwise engage with the proposed content. In its December “report card,” Disqus claimed readers who dwell in comments are more likely to visit other pages and spend more than twice as much time on the site. Meanwhile, reader comments overall are being treated with a new seriousness due to recent studies that suggest they shape perceptions more than we thought.

Big money from “native advertising?”

Disqus is also betting its promoted content will gain traction as a form of “native advertising.” The concept, hailed by some as a magic bullet to solve falling online ad prices, involves selling ads that mimic the content around it — for instance, sponsored tweets on Twitter. In the case of Disqus, the American Express story in the above graphic is a “native” ad. The company is so confident of the concept that it’s betting that the advertising scheme will soon become the bulk of its business.

“We expect advertising revenue to grow from less than 5% in Q4 of 2012 to over 60% of our revenue by the end of this year,” said the company’s CEO, Daniel Ha, by email.

It’s an ambitious goal but can Disqus pull this off? It has a number of factors in its favor, including the presence of veteran VC and native advertising champion Fred Wilson as one of its investors. The company is also in a good position to sign up clients due to the fact that it already has access to millions of websites.

On the other hand, the company’s quest to turn reader comments into gold faces some obstacles. One is Disqus’s capacity to find relevant content. When I visited several sites using “Promoted Discovery,” the suggested stories it proposed often had nothing to do with the article I was reading. A Disqus spokesman responded by saying the product is brand new and that its capacity to propose content will improve rapidly with use and as inventory grows. This seems a fair response — it’s likely Disqus will improve with scale.

The longer term challenge to making money from content is likely to hinge on publishers’ willingness to offer a service that will take readers away from their own website. For now, though, the websites are likely to simply welcome the extra money they receive from Promoted Discovery; Disqus says the first batch of checks is going out this quarter. It will be interesting to see what type of revenue-share arrangement Disqus and other middlemen will ask going forward — a Disqus spokesman wouldn’t disclose any specifics, saying the firm’s take is “industry average.”

And, finally, Disqus’s bet that comments will be an advertising gold mine could also be affected by competition from much larger players such as Tumblr; its founder, David Karp (who is speaking at our paidContent 2013 media conference in New York on April 17), recently said the site downplayed comments in favor of “a beautiful design and no jerks.”

(Image by ollyy via Shutterstock)

The Indian sites will join Gawker’s new Spanish-language version of Gizmodo — which launched on Monday — as well as local versions of various Gawker sites that have launched in Brazil, Hungary and the United Kingdom. In some cases, as with India, the local sites are run by partners in that country, and consist of translated blog posts from the U.S. site as well as some local content created by those partners.

Gawker’s partner in Brazil — a media entity called F451 — runs native versions of four Gawker sites (Gizmodo, Kotaku, Jezebel and Jalopnik) while the company’s partner in Japan runs just a local version of Gizmodo. And in Hungary, the Gawker presence consists of a site called Cink.hu, which isn’t really a copy of any of the blog network’s other sites and is run by Laszlo Szily, who worked for Denton when the Gawker founder was a Financial Times correspondent in Hungary.

Gizmodo’s new Spanish site and the Hungarian site are new variations on the model because they aren’t based on partnerships with local operators like the Times of India — they are both owned and operated by the U.S. company, using staff who write in the other language (although both will also run translated versions of Gawker content). Some of the staff at Gizmodo’s new Spanish version are based in New York and others in Spain, a result of Gawker’s recent acquisition of a local Gawker-style site called Guanabee, whose founder now runs Gizmodo en Espanol.

Gawker wants international to be 20 percent of revenue

I asked Denton whether the company is expanding internationally because growth in the U.S. market has slowed and he said no — according to the Gawker CEO, the blog network says it expects to see 40-per-cent growth in 2013, an even faster rate than it saw in 2012, although Denton didn’t say whether that was revenue or some other metric (Update: Denton clarified to me via Twitter that he meant revenues). He also said he wants to take international revenues to 20 percent of Gawker’s sales from the 5-per-cent level they are at currently, and that international deals are much more lucrative for Gawker because the profit margins are higher,.

As for what comes next, Denton said China is the biggest hole in Gawker Media’s portfolio of international properties. The company has been trying to set something up there but hasn’t been able to find the right local partner yet, he said, and therefore it may need to publish Chinese content from somewhere outside the country if it wants to make inroads into that market.

Denton also said that the company’s new Kinja platform has been a big part of the expansion, since it allows Gawker sites to host more active conversations and discussions than the previous version — including discussions that are sponsored by advertisers. Gawker launched the new platform last year, and Denton told me in an interview at the time that the focus on discussions awas going to be a big part of the future of Gawker.

The real-estate blog Curbed and its sister food and shopping sites, Eater and Racked appear to be bucking that trend.  The sites, which are owned by Lockhart Steele, cater to local audiences looking for buildings, restaurants or sales. How has he made local pay when others like AOL’s hyper-local network, Patch, have flopped?

“It’s a little counterintuitive. We’re a local company that’s not really interested in local advertising,” says Steele, explaining that the sites’ primary sponsors are national brands with big ad budgets like Ben & Jerry’s or Absolut Vodka.

Steele says big brands use Curbed to tap into local communities of shoppers, foodies or home buyers in different regions. He cites a recent example in which Curbed threw a party in Portland on behalf of Patron Tequila. “We can activate audiences in each of these cities we’re in, and activate a real community.”

Steele says there simply isn’t enough money in local advertising – with one exception. “The one place you can sell local is real estate … It’s the only category of hyper-local that’s really flush with money.”

The Mobile Morass: it’s ok to sit on the sidelines

Publishers are watching with growing consternation as audiences are moving en masse to mobile devices but ad dollars are not. Steele admits he doesn’t know how or when the mobile riddle will be solved but says he is not concerned.

Steele says it’s unrealistic to expect readers to download a publisher’s app unless you offer “non-stop engagement like Netflix” and adds that apps “create another distracting channel that you have to worry about.” He says Curbed is content to watch the mobile experiments of companies like Conde Naste which have been more bullish about apps.

“A lot of interesting start-ups in the digital media space are sitting on the sidelines .. We’re happy  to see big guys throw around hundreds of thousands on development. We’ll keep our powder try and watch others. If someone hits on the right strategy, we’re not above copying it.” In the meantime, Curbed is content to look for niche mobile opportunities like email newsletters and monetizing the screen that launches when a reader first downloads an app.

Why blogs are beautiful & Gawker’s still got it

Steele says his favorite sites are those that use a traditional blog layout like the Awl or Andrew Sullivan. He believes in a format that lets readers “scroll down and know when they’re full,” versus busy homepages like New York magazine which Steele describes as “seizure-inducing” (though he loves NY mag’s content).

Does he still follow Nick Denton, his former mentor and boss at Gawker, where Steele was the gossip site’s longtime managing editor?

“I still think Nick is one of the most interesting people in media. When it comes to product vision in this media space … I think Nick is pushing forward some of the most interesting ideas,” he said, citing Gawker’s recent attempt to transform the idea of reader comments.

Who else? Steele calls Jim Bankoff and Vox Media the “standard bearer for the media space,” He says sites like Vox Media’s The Verge are “the most beautiful on the web” for their seamless integration of text, audio and video.

Display ads are the Future

No really. While prominent display skeptics like BuzzMedia’s Jonah Peretti claim that banners (those ads that stretch across the top and side of web pages) belong to an earlier era of web publishing, Steele disagrees. “Display advertising is the future. Part of the reason is that display is also the past – people made fun of banners when they debuted on Hotwire in 1995.”

Steele’s point is that display advertising is a staple of the internet economy that publishers and advertisers now know how to buy, use and sell. He says companies continue to see these ads as powerful opportunities to build brand image. This is different than revenue from “click-through” ads about which “no one has illusions.”

To make display advertising work, Steele says, it’s important to keep ad sales in-house. “Giving inventory to ad networks puts you in a world of spiraling CPM’s.”

New York is tech and San Francisco is media (and vice versa)

“The old idea that New York created media and San Francisco created great product is out the window,” says Steele, citing Foursquare, the popular location-based social network, which long shared a roof with Curbed. He believes both cities are pushing each other to improve media platforms and publications. But that doesn’t mean he likes them equally.

“I’m a tried and true New Yorker. If lived in San Francisco, I’d have to kill myself. Other than that it’s a great city.”

(Images by Etienne Volschenk, Kiselev Andrey Valerevich and upthebanner via Shutterstock; L. Steele image via Flickr)