G/O Media Sells Gizmodo to Keleops Media
The tech website Gizmodo has been sold to a European media company, the latest brand from the publisher G/O Media to go out the door.
The buyer is Keleops Media, Jim Spanfeller, G/O Media’s chief executive, told the staff in an email on Tuesday. Mr. Spanfeller did not disclose the financial details of the sale, but said that it represented “a substantial premium from our original purchase price for the site.” A G/O Media spokesman declined to comment.
Mr. Spanfeller said Keleops, which is based in France and Switzerland, had agreed to keep all of Gizmodo’s staff members, who would continue working in G/O Media’s New York office “at least for the near term.”
“The site’s new owners are very excited to be getting a great brand with a talented group of journalists,” he wrote in the email, which was viewed by The New York Times.
Keleops publishes four consumer tech websites: Journal du Geek, 01net, Presse Citron and iPhon. Jean-Guillaume Kleis, the chief executive of Keleops, said in an interview on Tuesday that the company had been looking to make an acquisition in the United States for several years and Gizmodo was “an obvious choice.”
He declined to comment on the financial details of the transaction, but said it was “a sizable deal for us.”
“In the next year, we just want to make sure it stays an iconic brand and it becomes even stronger,” Mr. Kleis said. He added that his team would work with Gizmodo’s editorial staff in the coming weeks to see what was needed to improve the website and potentially make some hires.
“What is very important for us is the quality,” he said. “We are looking for high-quality journalists.”
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’s sites included Gizmodo, The Onion, The Root, Kotaku and others.
G/O Media, which is owned by the private equity firm Great Hill Partners, sold the satirical news site The Onion in April to a group of digital media veterans. It has also sold off Jezebel, Lifehacker, Deadspin and the A.V. Club in recent years. The websites it still owns are the business news site Quartz, the auto site Jalopnik, the gaming site Kotaku, the Black commentary and news site The Root and the reviews site The Inventory.
In his memo on Tuesday, Mr. Spanfeller said that the advertising market, which the websites rely on heavily for revenue, was seeing signs of improvement and that G/O Media had seen “some terrific sales wins on both the direct and programmatic advertising fronts” in the past few months.
