A Gawker stalker

LI ad agency makes first bid for site

Gawker took its first tentative steps to being revived when a bankruptcy judge on Tuesday accepted a $1 million opening bid for the gossipy Web site that went dark in 2016.

The bid, from Didit, a Long Island digital ad agency, comes with plans to turn the once snarky site into a “good gossip” news site, the agency’s co-founder told The Post.

Didit’s offer, called a stalking-horse bid, is expected to be certified by a judge on June 20. An auction for the Gawker site will take place in July — although no date has been chosen yet.

Gawker Media — which included sports news site Deadspin, tech site Gizmodo and women-focused blog Jezebel — was forced into bankruptcy in 2016 after a Florida jury awarded former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan $140 million in an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit.

The Hogan suit was eventually settled for $31 million.

The other sites were sold to Univision, leaving just Gawker in Chapter 11 and dormant.

Gawker had aired an excerpt of a video of Hogan, whose real name is Terry Bollea, having sex with the wife of his then best friend.

If Didit wins the auction, it will sail Gawker in a new direction, covering “good gossip only” as part of a new “story telling platform” to be used in a “caused-based marketing” platform, according to the agency’s co-founder and executive chairman, Kevin Lee.

“We’ll cover celebrity babies and dating, but not the cheating or the DWIs or the rehabs,” said Lee, whose 100employee, Mineola-based company has such clients as Foot Locker and Stamps.com.

The move to establish a stalking-horse bid was made possible because Silicon Valley mogul Peter Thiel, a PayPal co-founder who was among the suitors, dropped out. At an earlier attempt to auction off Gawker, Thiel was expected to bid — and then shut the site for good if he won.

Thiel funded Hogan’s lawsuit and has been gunning for Gawker for years — ever since it outed him as gay.