What Denton Didn’t Say About Calacanis

ValleyWag blogger and serial entrepreneur Nick Denton had a nice little scoop about Weblogs Inc. founder Jason Calacanis leaving AOL, and expresses considerable admiration for the sometimes-competitor of Denton’s Gawker Media. (We say “sometimes” because Calacanis’ empire has a lot more breadth, depth and niches than most of what Denton musters.)

Denton, while giving what we’ll call a grudging paean to Calacanis leaves out one very important detail:

“After a false start publishing internet trade blogs under the Weblogs Inc. banner, Calacanis finally found business success with consumer-oriented web titles such as Engadget, Autoblog and Joystiq. Disclosure: Calacanis hired away the founding editor of Gizmodo, a Gawker Media title, in establishing Engadget. Gawker and WIN compete, head-to-head, in gadget, auto and videogame coverage.”

Not only did Calacanis poach uber-blogger Peter Rojas [pictured], but after forming Engadget, Rojas within months surpassed Denton’s Gizmodo. (As we write this, Engadget is #1 in Technorati’s most popular list, with 26,144 links, while Gizmodo’s #4, with 14,668.) Maybe Denton wishes he competed head-to-head with Engadget.

The secret to Calacanis’ success, as one insider told us: He shares in the profits in a way Denton won’t. He keeps his bloggers happy and, the insider claimed, avoids the churn and subsequent traffic dips that can come when a blogger who’s built up an audience leaves. Rojas, for one, has done very well and still owns a piece of Engadget. Others have argued on Denton’s behalf that new blood does good once a blogger gets stale. We’re not saying — and if we did we’d have an “it depends” kind of answer. But this isn’t about us, anyway.

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