Yahoo! Syndicates Gawker Blogs

Yahoo today is expected to reveal it’s signed a deal with Gawker Media to host content — filtered for vulgarity — from Nick Denton’s stable of Weblogs.

Yahoo News will carry five to seven posts a day from each of five Gawker titles: Gawker, Wonkette, Gizmodo, Defamer and Lifehacker. Terms were not disclosed, but the main value to Denton may be the traffic Yahoo can generate back to his own domains.

Weblog distribution deals are increasingly common, and appear to have emerged as a favored model for blog publishers to work with big media. Yahoo has a similar arrangement with the Huffington Post, with content appearing in the opinion section of Yahoo News. Meanwhile, Gawker distributes content in Europe in partnership with VNU Media. And just yesterday, political blogger Andrew Sullivan said he had signed with Time.com to host and sell ads on his site.

The reverse approach, buying blogs outright, was exemplified in AOL’s acquisition of Weblogs Inc. Yahoo is pursuing a strategy of creating more original content but so far it appears comfortable running mostly third party programming.

“We’ve said all along, we’re always going to rely on the content we get from our partners,” said Yahoo spokesman Brian Nelson.

Nelson added Gawker’s content, frequently laced with profanities, will pass through a language filter before appearing on the news portal. “The content isn’t for everyone… Of course, all of it will be in line with our editorial policies,” he said. “There won’t be profanity running on our site.”

Yahoo is working to link its portal up with blog content in more ways than one. Earlier this fall, the company added blogs to its News Search results.