Gothamist, a metro website company, founded in 2003, now has 13 city-specific websites, which reach 2.7 million unique readers a month, according to Quantcast. For a long time, in my opinion, Gothamist was stubborn about growing as a business. Its publisher, Jake Dobkin, did much of the business himself, and didn't think the math worked out to have full-time ad salespeople. More recently, that math has apparently changed, and now the goal is to have as many ad salespeople as can support themselves. 16 million pageviews a month is, in the web business, a totally decent amount of inventory to sell. And for a larger media company that [...]

Gawker Media honcho Nick Denton offers a perspective on the announcement yesterday of the sale of Gothamist to Rainbow Media, which is owned by Cablevision. "It's subject to long-term capital gains — but also to New York State tax. So that's at least a quarter off. Let's say Jake and Jen end up with $1.5m each. That sounds like a lot; but they've been at the job seven years. And my understanding is that the contract would require them to stick around for another three, making a decade in total. So that works out as about $150,000 per year — plus any compensation under the employment [...]