With the intention of making blogs more accessible to the public, Nick Denton of Gawker Media and Meg Hourihan of Pyra Labs created Kinja, which began as an investigation into the navigation of blogs. It was dubbed Kinja in October 2003.[2]
On February 11, 2013, Kinja 1.0 was launched on Jalopnik.[3] Changes included an entire site and platform redesign, favoring a more Tumblr-esque design. Users received the ability to create their own blogs on Kinja, replacing the old profile system. Comments, replies, and posts all aggregate on the user's personal blog.
In 2017, following Univision Communications' purchase of Gawker Media assets and their reorganization as Gizmodo Media Group, the company began to migrate some of its existing websites to Kinja as well, including The A.V. Club, Fusion (whose online editorial operation was later re-launched as Splinter), The Root, and The Onion. As of April 2018, ClickHole is also on the Kinja platform. The move was made as Univision staff were heavily interested in Kinja's "inset" feature for external links—which can display Amazon.com affiliate links with product thumbnails and prices, as they can be used to generate e-commerce revenue.[9][10]
Usage
Kinja is a personal web service that allows its users to "bookmark" blogs, Kinja providing the user with excerpts of recent posts of the chosen blogs. These excerpts, known as personal "digests", are compiled into one page of excerpts, with other categorized compilations available based on such labels as media, music, liberal, conservative, and more. A user's personal selection of digests is easily available to any outside user, allowing others to share their favorite blogs and recent blog posts. Utilizing a webcrawler dubbed Kinjabot (similar to Google's webcrawlers), Kinja creates an internal index of all available weblogs as defined by Kinjabot.
