After a long period of uncertainty, Kotaku has been acquired by Keleops, the European company that previously purchased Gizmodo from G/O Media last year. Keleops CEO Jean-Guillaume Kleis made a statement to Axios that the current editorial staff will remain and that the company plans to hire more talent, as it has with Gizmodo. According to its masthead, Kotaku currently has six full-time members of its editorial staff, a number slashed by G/O Media after repeated layoffs and pivots.
This marks the 12th site that G/O Media has sold since 2023, with the rest of the acquisitions outside those previously mentioned as follows: Lifehacker went to Ziff Davis, Deadspin was acquired by Lineup Publishing, The Onion was purchased by Global Tetrahedron, The Takeout and Jalopnik went to Static Media, Quartz and The Inventory were taken by Redbrick, and last but not least, Jezebel, Splinter, and The A.V. Club went to Paste Media. With the latest sale, G/O Media is down to a single site, The Root, which it is also looking to move.
Shortly after the news broke, G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller wrote a statement titled “G/O Media Epilogue,” where he aimed to defend his track record while pinning his company’s problems to unions. In a particularly telling line, he describes “how the business in general was doing as well or better than the vast majority of its peers,” but that this wasn’t enough for Great Hill Partners, the private equity firm that predominantly owned G/O Media.
However, at danger of pointing out how many venture capital and private equity firms hold absurd expectations for media companies to generate unsustainable, exponential growth, he then defends his owners in the following paragraph. “This is in no way a suggestion that Great Hill was in some way acting like a rapacious private equity firm,” he writes. He then goes on to allege that unions made “widely wrong and disingenuous accusations,” before bloviating about how it’s bad that unions advocate for workers, which is, in fact, the purpose of unions.
G/O Media was formed back in 2019, after Great Hill Partners purchased the Gizmodo Media Group (which included Kotaku) and the Onion’s portfolio. Before being sold to G/O Media, Kotaku was acquired by the now-defunct Gawker Media in 2009.
