Technology website Gizmodo has been sold to a European media company, the latest brand from publisher G/O Media to hit the market.
The buyer is Keleops Media, Jim Spanfeller, CEO of G/O Media, told staff in an email Tuesday. Spanfeller did not disclose financial details of the sale, but said it represented “a substantial premium to our original purchase price for the site.” AG/O Media spokesman declined to comment.
Spanfeller said Keleops, based in France and Switzerland, had agreed to keep all Gizmodo staff members, who would continue to work in G/O Media’s New York office “at least in the short term.”
“The new owners of the site are very excited to have a great brand with a talented group of journalists,” he wrote in the email, which was seen by The New York Times. Keleops Media did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the sale.
Gizmodo is the latest website sold by G/O Media, which was formed in 2019 as a collection of websites that once belonged to the Gawker Media empire. At the time, Gawker sites included Gizmodo, The Onion, The Root, Kotaku, and others.
G/O Media, owned by private equity firm Great Hill Partners, sold satirical news site The Onion in April to a group of digital media veterans. He has also sold Jezebel, Lifehacker, Deadspin and AV Club in recent years. The websites it still owns are business news site Quartz, automotive site Jalopnik, gaming site Kotaku, news and commentary site Black The Root, and review site The Inventory.
In his Tuesday memo, Spanfeller said that the advertising market, on which website revenues largely depend, was seeing signs of improvement and that G/O Media had seen “some fantastic sales increases on both the direct advertising as well as programmatic”. ”in recent months.