Don't ask Nick Denton, publisher of Gawker Media and its growing list of popular Web logs, about his empire. "People come up to me as if it's witty and say, 'How is the empire going?'" Denton said, "which is pretty pathetic."

Don't ask him about his business plan, either. He says he never had one. The only reason he formed the company, he said, was to make his network of blogs which includes Gawker, the flagship chronicle of Manhattan news and gossip; Fleshbot, the thinking person's diary of smut; and about 10 other titles more attractive to advertisers.

"It doesn't help with readers," he said. "It's actually a disadvantage, because it looks corporate."

Blogs Overhyped? While media conferences, like "Les Blogs" in Paris two weeks ago, debate the potential of the form, and with BusinessWeek declaring on the cover of a recent issue that "blogs will change your business," Denton is withering in his contempt. A blog, he says, is much better at tearing things down people, careers, brands than it is at building them up. As for the blog revolution, Denton said, "Give me a break."

"The hype," he said, "comes from unemployed or partially employed marketing professionals and people who never made it as journalists wanting to believe. They want to believe there's going to be this new revolution and their lives are going to be changed."

For all of the disdain that Denton brings to the discussion of this nonrevolution, there is no question that he and his team are trying to turn the online diarist's form ephemeral, fast-paced and scathingly opinionated into a viable, if not lucrative, enterprise . Big advertisers like Audi, Nike (NYSE: NKE) and General Electric (NYSE: GE) have all vied for eyeballs on Gawker's blogs, which Denton describes as sexy, irreverent, a tad elitist and unabashedly coastal.

He says that there is no magic behind Gawker Media, his three-year-old venture based in New York. To his mind, it is built around a basic publishing model. But like it or not in the overheated atmosphere of blog, Denton, 38, remains one of the most closely watched entrepreneurs in the business.

Behind the Scenes

Denton, a British expatriate and former Financial Times reporter who made millions in two previous ventures, declined to say whether Gawker was profitable or how much he paid Gawker's dozen or so bloggers editors, as the company calls them.

On a recent visit, Gawker Media hands including Lockhart Steele, the company's managing editor, and Gina Trapani, the editor of one of the company's most recent blogs, Lifehacker were plucking away at their laptops in a quiet, whitewashed loft space in the TriBeCa neighborhood of Manhattan. Steele, who joined the company in February, is the den mother for Gawker's far-flung collection of bloggers and is in near-constant communication with them throughout the day.

About half of the editors live in New York. The rest are distributed around the country. In California, Mark Lisanti edits Defamer, the Los Angeles counterpart to Gawker, and in Colorado, Brian Crecente edits one of the newer sites, Kotaku, dedicated to video games. In New Orleans, John d'Addario edits Fleshbot, while Ana Marie Cox covers political gossip from Washington on Wonkette.

Each editor is under contract to post 12 times a day for a flat fee, Steele said. (Gawker has two editors and now posts 24 times a day.) It is best to have eight posts up before noon, if possible, to keep readers coming back, he said.

Site traffic is a particular obsession. Gawker draws just over a million unique visitors a month; Fleshbot, the most popular site, lures nearly twice that number, and Gizmodo, a site dedicated to gadgets, roughly 1.5 million. All editors can earn bonuses if they manage to generate spikes in traffic.

Dismissing the Buzz

Trapani's hour-by-hour traffic statistics serve as the desktop image on her computer. "It's extremely fast-paced," she said. "It's a lot of output. Some days it's overwhelming without a doubt. Other days it goes really smoothly if I get some good reader tips and there's something great going on."

Like Denton, Trapani was careful not to discuss specifics of Gawker's business, including how much its editors are paid. But a published interview with Steele this year provides some insight. Bloggers are paid a set rate of $2,500 a month, he told a digital journalism class at New York University taught by Patrick Phillips, editor and founder of I Want Media, a Web site focusing on media news. Asked how Gawker was faring financially, Steele's response was straightforward.

"It is profitable," he said. The simplicity of the Gawker business model may be why Denton is dismissive of all the buzz surrounding blogs. He seems to recognize that he is not up to anything particularly trailblazing and that it is only a matter of time before others catch on. Competitors like Jason Calacanis's Weblogs, with its network of more than 70 consumer and niche blogs, are already copying the Gawker model. Grouping the blogs, Denton said, was meant to give the company an air of respectability.

"The only reason we're listed as a group at all is for advertisers," he said. Gawker's familiarity with the ways of the advertising business makes a difference in the world of blogs, where marketers still fear to tread, said Jill Griffin, who is now a senior vice president and group account director at Media Contacts, the interactive division of the Media Planning Group of Havas. Earlier, when she was a digital strategist at the marketing firm OMD, Griffin was one of the first advertising executives to bring big-name clients to blogs including Absolut and GE to Gawker.

"I think it was in mid-2003," Griffin said. "It was just myself and some friends and business associates in the professional advertising community. We just started reading Gawker because we thought it was a hoot."

Pursuing an Agenda

She said that after realizing that they were all single, young, well-paid and casting their gaze on this fertile space, she thought, "We've got to get on that."

On the Gawker sites, CPM rates the cost for every 1,000 times an ad is presumably seen by visitors can run anywhere from US$4 for a small, button-size ad to $50 for exclusive-sponsorship ads, in which an advertiser helps underwrite the debut of a new Gawker site. (Sony did this for Gawker's blog Lifehacker.)

Denton says that a clear line is drawn between editorial and advertising and that so far none of the companies buying space on the sites has ever tried to influence content. "It goes beyond any kind of question of church and state or journalistic ethics that the whole editorial tone of the Gawker sites is absolutely wrapped up in the notion of 'take no prisoners,'" Denton said. "It owes nothing to anybody, and if one ever started compromising that, it would be grim."

But others have begun to wonder if the brand itself is a form of compromise. Stowe Boyd, president of Corante, a daily online news digest on the technology sector, suggests that there may be something lost when networks like Gawker Media and Weblogs turn blogs into commodities owned by an overlord and underwritten by advertisers.

"They're pursuing a very clear agenda, and they've done very well with that," Boyd said of Gawker. "But they're just an old-media company in new-media clothes, and I still maintain that they are missing part of the point."

The point, Boyd said, is that blogging is unique because of its spontaneity and individualism, and that bloggers, like dancers and sculptors, are interesting because they are "pursuing their muse."

Mere 'Hirelings'

The editors on Gawker are talented, entertaining and informative, Boyd said, but also indistinguishable from any freelance writer, with no ownership of what they produce. "These people are hirelings," he said. "What they are cranking out are the 700 words they signed on to produce."

Other critics wonder whether the hoopla over the commercial viability of blogs is overstated.

"Blogs primarily excel at marketing and promotion for companies or individuals," Phillips of I Want Media said. "I think blogging can catapult unknown writers, and it can give them a platform if they're talented. But as a stand-alone business, I think the jury is still out on that."

Denton said that no one, least of all him, was becoming rich publishing blogs. It's not about the money, he said.

"There are too many people looking at blogs as being some magic bullet for every company's marketing problem, and they're not," he said. "It's Internet media. It's just the latest iteration of Internet media."