Denton shuts Defamer as stand alone site, now part of Gawker

Gawker Media’s Nick Denton has shut Defamer as a standalone site.

Defamer wasn’t named when Denton started making cuts to the network in November (we speculated it might be cut), but was said to be close to a sale late December when Consumerist changed hands.

Denton said in a statement that Defamer would become the entertainment column of Gawker, in the same way that Valleywag is now part of the site:

Gawker now draws more than 3m visitors a month — four times the audience it had in 2007. More than three-quarters of Gawker’s readership is from outside New York. The inclusion of Defamer’s Hollywood gossip — following an expansion of political coverage last year and the incorporation of Valleywag — reflects Gawker’s evolution into a national gossip site.

All three writers from the site are out of work, with Gawker staff taking over the writing duties, although Denton is looking to hire a gossip writer for the column.

Launched four years ago, Defamer delivers respectable traffic of 1.1m visitors a month for 5.9 million page views per Quantcast direct measure.

We don’t know yet how the announcement will affect Defamer Australia, the licensed Australia edition that like the other Gawker titles held by Allure Media, relies heavily on content from the original American sites.

Another consolidation as the wide blogging model slowly dies.