• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, May 27, 2016

The already-pretty-strange saga of Gawker, Hulk Hogan, Bubba the Love Sponge, and the least erotic sex tape ever just seems to get stranger with each passing day.

That follows the revelation earlier this week that PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel had contributed $10 million to help fund Hogan’s (real name Terry Gene Bollea) lawsuit against Gawker for violation of privacy.

It's all part of a long-planned revenge against Gawker outing Thiel in 2007, Gawker founder Nick Denton confirmed that several big media companies have expressed interest in acquiring the gossip site and its sister properties, despite the $140 million judgment against it.

He then challenged Thiel to a public debate to “improve public understanding of the interplay of media and power.”

Amid all the gloating and posturing (in his open letter to Thiel, Denton portrayed Gawker as a “small New York media company”) one thing has become clear: Gawker Media is actually a bit of an online publishing juggernaut, when all the other sites are taken into account.

According to research outfit SimilarWeb, Gawker Media’s portfolio of eight sites (including the flagship site, Gizmodo, LifeHacker.com, Deadspin, Jezebel, i09, Kotaku and Jalopnik) together generated a formidable 419 million page views in April of this year across desktop and mobile.

To put that in perspective, SimilarWeb notes that Gawker Media’s combined page views beat Forbes, with 384 million desktop and mobile views; Hearst Corp., publisher of Cosmopolitan and Elle, among other magazines and newspapers, with 335.8 million page views; and News Corp., publisher of The Wall Street Journal and New York Post, with 267 million views.

Turning to the individual sites, tech and gadget site Gizmodo is actually the most popular with 109.3 million page views in April, followed by service and DIY site LifeHacker, with 81.4 million page views; sports site Deadspin, with 56.3 million page views; and only then flagship Gawker.com, with 49 million page views in April.

Next up was gamer site Kotaku, with 44.8 million page views; auto site Jalopnik with 39.1 million views; women’s interest site Jezebel, with 37.3 million views; and future tech, science fiction and general geekery site io9, with 1.4 million views.