VentureBeat

It’s time for media and advertising to join other industries that are battening down for an oncoming recession, according to Gawker Media founder Nick Denton. He’s cutting almost 15 percent of his workforce, or 19 of 133 people.

Denton is worth paying attention to, because Gawker is one of the most successful new media companies around. Gossip rag Valleywag might be the best known of its properties in Silicon Valley, but the most successful of the 12 blogs Denton runs are the “gadget guide” Gizmodo, gaming blog Kotaku and the flagship property, Gawker.

His complete letter to employees was reprinted by Valleywag, which lost three of its five writers. One thing to note is that the cuts are only coming to the less popular of Gawker’s blogs, so this looks more like a cautionary move than full-scale panic.

But if Denton is right, the Gawker network — which gets over 20 million unique visitors a month — will be in less trouble than many new media brands and advertising startups. And long-suffering old media, meaning newspapers, television and radio, may be pushed from its current slimming diet to outright starvation.

Tracking photos on the web isn’t easy. And getting paid a royalty each time a photo is viewed? Fuggedaboutit.

Well, GumGum says it can do just that. The Santa Monica, Calif.-based start-up has an analytics technology that tracks photos across the web and counts how many times they are viewed. It allows the copyright owner to get paid per view or to be paid a share of ads that go with the photos.

The company announced today that it has completed a first round of $1.2 million in funding that we previously reported was in the works. First Round Capital and Crosscut Ventures led the round. Ophir Tanz, chief executive of GumGum, said that the company has tested the technology in the past 60 days and has had some astounding results. More than 300 million views of licensed photos have been tracked each month.

GumGum tried out the usage-based content-licensing technology on MTV Europe as well as a number of sites that belong to Gawker Media, which owns blogs such as Gawker, Jesebel, Defamer, i09 and Valleywag. Typically, photographers can get paid if they sell their photos to stock-photo companies such as Getty Images, which charges a standard flat rate.

But Tanz says that with such a royalty scheme there is no way to distinguish between the high-use photos and the ones that don’t get used.

“Online content lives forever, but usage is almost entirely unknown,” he said.

Other companies wrap software layers around photos using Adobe’s Flash technology to collect analytic data for photo usage. Competitors using Flash include Kickapps and Mochila. But Tanz said his company’s second version technology can track any photo, whether it is in the Flash format or any other format.

Nick Denton, publisher of Gawker Media, said in a statement that GumGum reduces his photo-licensing costs and still allows Gawker to publish high-quality photos from a number of photo agencies. Tanz and Ari Mir founded GumGum in 2006 and launched the company’s site in November 2007.