G/O Media
American media company

G/O Media Inc. was an American media holding company that owned and operated several digital media outlets.
It was formed in 2019 after the private equity firm Great Hill Partners purchased two digital portfolios from Univision: Gizmodo Media Group (Gizmodo, Jezebel, Deadspin, Lifehacker, Splinter, The Root, Kotaku, and Jalopnik) and the Onion portfolio (The Onion, ClickHole, The A.V. Club, and The Takeout). Since 2023, the company has sold off many of its outlets, including The Onion and Gizmodo, which were the source of "the G and O of its name". By October 2025, it had no remaining outlets and was in the process of sunsetting its operations.
History
G/O was formed in April 2019 when Great Hill Partners, a private equity firm, purchased the websites from Univision for $18.9 million. Prior to the sale, the former Gawker Media properties had operated as Gizmodo Media Group after being acquired by Univision following the conclusion of the Bollea v. Gawker lawsuit and subsequent bankruptcy in 2016. Former Forbes executive Jim Spanfeller became the CEO of G/O Media. In the first twelve months following its purchase of the websites, G/O shut down Splinter News in November 2019 and sold ClickHole in February 2020 to Cards Against Humanity.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “G/O Media” is american media company. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Media, American and media, not as a finished interpretation.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q65965651. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2019, 2023, 2025 and 2016.
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This entry incorporates text from “G/O Media” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.