Iconoclash: Jezebel in the Spotlight

When your brand is build on being provocative and something of an iconoclast, you're going to go after other brands, including other iconoclasts. Which is what Jon Stewart's The Daily Show and Jezebel are doing.

Gawker's post-feminist blog recently accused Comedy Central's The Daily Show of being sexist by not featuring more women. Stewart swiped back on-air (see the 2:05 mark here) while his female staffers responded with a mocking note posted on the show's website.

It's all great for business as far as Gawker Media owner Nick Denton is concerned.

Denton told the New York Times that the female-skewing (and male-skewering) site has surpassed Gawker in monthly page views, and "in some ways has eclipsed" its big brother. Gaby Darbyshire, Gawker Media’s COO and Denton's friend/advisor/legal eagle, says the site draws more complaints than any of Gawker's other online properties — a sign that it's doing its job.

Launched in 2007, Jezebel prides itself on being “an antidote to superficiality and irrelevance of women’s media properties," as founding editor Anna Holmes told the Times. "I felt disillusioned by magazines to a certain degree because they perpetuate this insecurity factory and present solutions to the insecurities they just created.”

Stewart is in good company, as Jezebel routinely skewers celebrities such as Gywneth Paltrow and Elle MacPherson, and rants against airbrushed fashion magazine images in its regular Photoshop of Horrors feature. The blog boasts 37 million page views monthly, 200,000 unique visitors daily, and skews 97 percent female. The philosophy is in-your-face and anti-B.S.

The site's manifesto lays out its mission as the anti-Glamour, Marie Claire and other mainstream women's media brand: “We wanted to make the sort of women's magazine we'd want to read, a magazine that would never actually see glossy paper because big-name advertisers and the publishers who kowtow to them don't much like it when you point out the vulgarity of a $2000 handbag."

Ad Age commented early on that Jezebel was “one of the few genuinely intelligent repositories of media/marketing/fashion commentary/celebrity deflation.”

Advertisers, including The New York Times, American Apparel (a recurring target), Dentyne, Skyy vodka, Clairol, Starbucks, and TV networks are nonplussed.

The reason, of course: buzz and traffic. The post accusing Stewart's show of being anti-female garnered 211,000 plus page views and 1,000-plus comments. Denton believes “This is Jezebel’s moment. Advertisers are no longer treating it as a cute new entrant.”

Holmes is no longer at the helm (she stepped down on June 30th to work on Jezebel-related book and TV projects), so it's now up to new editor-in-chief Jessica Coen to keep sacred cows on their hooves.

And with sibling site Gizmodo gaining brand recognition for its iPhone 4 scoop, looks like it's time for Gawker, which the British-born Denton founded to dish up insidery media and celebrity gossip and news and has since broadened its scope to take on the likes of the Huffington Post, to step up its own game.