It is -- the sites sold for $135m in 2016 (out of the gawker bankruptcy) to Univision. Gawker media group was famously operationally well run and threw off lots of cash.
After Great Hill bought them for $20m -- presumably with a ton of debt, or something -- they then put an idiot named Jim Spanfeller in charge. Jim managed to get the entire staff of deadspin -- also a profitable, well run site -- to quit en masse. Said staff later started Defector and are running it as a coop, basically. Defector has survived a full year running on subscription fees and largely without advertising (or maybe entirely without?).
Over the past decade advertisers shifted spending onto deep targeting (benefitting primarily FB and GOOG) and re-targeting (benefitting any rando site with lots of pageviews) away from interest-based publishers.
Is it just me or is that a shockingly low amount for those websites?