When CNN extended its contract with Larry King to 2009, most publications noted the interviewer’s high ratings, exclusive interviews with celebrities and trademark suspenders.

Not Defamer.com.

The Los Angeles-based celebrity-taunting Web site instead handled King’s contract extension with characteristic cheekiness, noting it ensures that the 71-year-old host will stay at CNN “until he collapses into a pile of dust in his desk chair.”

It was just another day at the office for Mark Lisanti, the 30-year-old editor of Defamer.com. For the past year he has been mining a rich vein of news and irreverent celebrity gossip for the increasingly popular site.

“The way (mainstream celebrity media) cover celebrities is really antithetical to what I’m trying to do,” Lisanti said. “We’re as much in the game of reporting rumors as we are in the game of reporting news. We’re not The New York Times.”

Lisanti said Defamer’s nuggets come from entertainment industry sources who e-mail him tips as well as other celebrity-driven Web sites. When he takes news from other sources, he often adds his own opinion or humor.

But how does that translate into dollars?

Owned by New York-based Gawker Media Inc., the web site had 3.9 million page views in February 2005. That’s far below major Web sites such as those run by the Los Angeles Times, which claims 65.3 million page views a month, but it’s high by the standards of the blog universe.

That’s gotten the attention of major companies such as Captain Morgan Rum Co., Absolut Spirits Co. and Advance Publications’ men.style.com., which have advertised on the site, catering to Defamer’s core audience: affluent young people who watch movies and spend lots of money.

Ricky Van Veen, whose Connected Ventures sells T-shirts with off-color humor and pop-culture slogans, said Defamer.com reaches the kind of people who buy his products.

“Advertising on Defamer is profitable for us because their readership is the perfect demographic for what we’re selling young, hip, snarky, and most importantly pop culturally aware,” Van Veen wrote in an e-mail message.

Blog ads


Privately held Gawker Media declined to release financial information about Defamer.com or its other Web sites, which include New York flagship gossip site Gawker.com and Washington, D.C.-based Wonkette.com, which generated buzz last year with, among other tidbits, its tales of an intern’s affairs.

Advertising on Defamer runs from $4 to $20 per thousand views, depending on how prominently the advertisement appears. With the site claiming more than 100,000 views daily, advertising would cost about $400 a day for a small “button” on the right side of the page to $2,000 a day for a rectangle embedded within the text.

Still it’s unclear if major advertisers are spending big bucks on blogs often solo ventures that function like Internet diaries when there are more popular Web sites, said Jarvis Coffin, president of BURST! Media LLC, a Massachusetts company that sells advertising on Web sites, including Defamer.com.

“Blogs are certainly a very visible, talked-about segment of the specialty content marketplace, but most advertising is on more conventional Web sites,” he said.

After writing his own personal blog and spending several years of working as an assistant on television programs, Lisanti hatched the idea of an irreverent Web journal skewering celebrities and disseminating gossip.

Los Angeles had lacked such an outlet, despite the proliferation of celebrity-driven media. While the New York Post dishes scoops in its famed Page Six column, the Los Angeles Times doesn’t run a celebrity gossip column.

Beverly Hills publicist Edward Lozzi, who represents celebrity clients, agreed that Defamer helps fill a void in entertainment industry gossip in Los Angeles.

While paparazzi keep a close eye on many well-known personalities, industry tidbits are harder to come by particularly in the Los Angeles-based media, he said.

“They all feed off the New York Post or the New York Daily News because there’s no other outlet here. That’s a shame,” Lozzi said.

Lisanti was already familiar with Gawker.com and got in touch with Gawker Media President Nick Denton. Lisanti said Denton offered to sponsor his Web site in Los Angeles and make Lisanti an independent contractor.

Denton declined to be interviewed. “We’re a private company, and don’t talk about any Gawker title as a business,” he wrote in an e-mail message.

But the company has not escaped attention. Denise Garcia, an analyst with Gartner Inc. in New York, thinks Gawker has done an especially good job matching advertisers with their target audiences, though she’s not sure how it all adds up.

“It’s not one of the measured media,” she said. “I don’t know how much money (Gawker Inc.) is making, but I do know that they’re approaching the blog space in an interesting way by creating that space for an advertiser to sponsor.”

Writes what he wants


Blogs have become an increasingly popular magnet for advertising, according to a November 2004 report by Gartner.

About 8.3 million people visited blogs hosted by the three most popular services in August 2004, up from 2.4 million in September 2003. About 11 percent of Internet users have blogs or regularly use them, and 35 percent log onto blogs at least occasionally, the report said.

Lisanti, the only employee of Defamer, said he doesn’t view celebrity magazines such as People Weekly, Us Weekly and In Touch as competition. Unlike magazines that curry favor with celebrities and their publicists in order to maintain access, Lisanti said he can write whatever he wants, such as a post mocking actress Demi Moore and her boyfriend, Ashton Kutcher, over rumors that Moore is pregnant.

In filtering through tips and other celebrity-centric Web sources, Lisanti said he tries to distinguish between credible information and false rumors, but does not apply the same journalistic standards as magazines or newspapers.

As a former writing assistant on sitcoms, Lisanti claims no journalistic ambitions or experience, but says Defamer is often ahead of mainstream news sources on Hollywood gossip. Its cheeky tone, he said, also is born of his experience laboring in Hollywood’s forgotten corners.

“My experience in Hollywood definitely colors it because I know what it’s like to be fetching coffee and running scripts around,” Lisanti said.