Nick Denton posts a short and frank piece on Gawker Media's walking away from their Yahoo syndication deal, conveying that the lack of love had become mutual. Part of the issue may be friction from Valleywag's postings taking Yahoo Media's Lloyd Braun to task, according to Denton, but the bigger issue seems to be bottom line. Yahoo didn't seem to broaden the appeal of Gawker properties in their syndication deal and at the same time Google AdSense ads added to Gawker pages seemed to be doing very well, thank you very much. So it's back to focusing on exposing content in search engines and social media venues for the independent Gawkers. Weblogs can certainly manage to be both popular and profitable and sometimes even corporate, but they tend to thrive on their publishers being themselves and attracting audiences who can accept their perspectives with whatever grain of salt is necessary at the time. That tends to be problematic for major brand advertisers, who are concerned about reach more than the contextual quality of a particular audience.

As I noted last fall major media properties cutting deals with weblogs is in some ways like old-time movie studios trying to snatch up raw talent that can be shaped into mass appeal products - except that the talent has many more independent options these days to develop audiences on their own as free agents. Trying to think of webloggers as starlets down at the soda fountain waiting to be discovered by Hollywood was always a stretch to start with in a Web world of finely focused audiences, but when the talent won't bend to help support brand advertising that's supposed to be your margin play then it becomes more problematic yet. Score one for The Long Tail and for independent publishers who can suck off the cream of audience attention while mass media content producers huddle in a smaller puddle of attention that people are willing to give to their offerings.