Linked List: August 18, 2016

Thursday, 18 August 2016

Gawker.com to End Operations Next Week 

J.K. Trotter, writing for Gawker:

After nearly fourteen years of operation, Gawker.com will be shutting down next week. The decision to close Gawker comes days after Univision successfully bid $135 million for Gawker Media’s six other websites, and four months after the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel revealed his clandestine legal campaign against the company.

Josh Marshall:

Needless to say, Gawker courted a huge amount of controversy. And the decision to shutter it may, for all I know, be tied entirely to legal liability. But I have no doubt Gawker’s controversial rep put a permanent dent in ads sales - think of it as an inverse premium. The other thing though is that Gawker had no endemic ad proposition. Fun, news scoops and schadenfreude have no allied consumer products. But if you look at the other Gawker Media sites they were each carefully and wisely aligned with strong endemic ad propositions.

So given all that’s happened, even over and above whatever legal complexities are involved, it makes sense that a big corporate media giant would see the other Gawker Media sites as the drivers of value, not Gawker itself.

It always seemed clear to me that Gawker was Nick Denton’s baby, a labor of love. The other more targeted Gawker sites were there to prop up Gawker financially. Now that the company has been sold, there’s no one left who wants Gawker propped up.

Olympic Medals Per Capita 

This is an interesting perspective on Olympic medal counts — pro-rated by population. The United States finishes in the middle of the pack, right behind Russia and North Korea. New Zealand and Jamaica are performing the best (other than statistical outliers).

India comes in dead last, by a long shot. This year they have just one single medal, from a country of over 1.3 billion people. This story by Justin Rowlatt for the BBC News makes it sound like there are three main factors:

  1. India is very poor. Their economy is growing, but the government is spending on education, not sports. They spend so little they make their athletes pay their own way to the Olympics.
  2. Indian culture doesn’t put much value on sports, so even good athletes are under family pressure to give it up and focus on school.
  3. Cricket is so popular in India that most of the best athletes play it — but cricket is not an Olympic sport. (And even if it were, it could only give them two additional medals: one for men and one for women.)