Or maybe she has already left. Ask different people at Nick Denton’s blog network about Darbyshire’s departure date and you’ll get different results. Some think she left last summer; others say last fall, and others insist that she’s still doing a few last things for Denton.

Details! The gist: Darbyshire, a Brit who kept all of Denton’s trains running and his employees out of (severe) legal trouble for the last decade-plus, is going to do something new.

Here’s her official take on the matter, delivered via email: “I had a great run with Nick at Gawker, but I want to do some other projects. Given that the company has matured into a well-oiled machine, it was the right time for me to move on, and change is a good thing for everyone.”

To get a sense of how important Darbyshire was to Denton, consult this excellent 2010 New York Observer profile, written by John Koblin, who now works for Denton at his Deadspin sports site.

Key paragraph:

Virtually all editors who have worked with the site agree that she’s very good at her very busy job, which is not just limited to being the head counsel. She is a sort of everywoman at Gawker, wearing hats that include overseeing law, finance, business development, the 401(k) deals, HR issues, maternity leave policy (which, as a testament to Gawker growing bigger and bigger, now needs to be drafted) — almost anything that is money-related and doesn’t deal with editorial or advertising.

Beyond her crucial role as Gawker’s chief grownup, Darbyshire was also notable for her long tenure. Gawker Media employees come and go all the time — last month, for instance, Gizmodo editor Joe Brown left for Wired; in January, Ray Wert left, just a half year after Denton put him in charge of “content creation” for advertisers – but Darbyshire has been with Denton forever.

Back in May, Denton shuffled his staff around and announced that he was putting Darbyshire in charge of international expansion efforts. Here’s the relevant part of that memo, for Gawker Media completists:

Our international efforts warrant greater attention — and that means a shift in responsibilities for Gaby Darbyshire and a cascade of job moves affecting Scott and others.

Currently, licensing provides some 8% of revenues — but a significantly greater portion of after-tax earnings. That’s pretty normal for a US-centric content company at our stage of development.

But software companies such as search engines can easily make 50% of their revenue overseas. As our language-independent discussion technology platform becomes more important, so will the international business.

As some of you know, we are expanding beyond our existing partnerships in Europe, Japan, Brazil and Australia. Our embryonic relationships in the Middle East, China and India will require much more cultivation — and the bulk of Gaby’s focus.

Brown will be Wired’s “New York editor,” a new role that will have him weighing in on the brand’s magazine, tablet edition and website. It’s his second time at Wired, where he had previously worked as a deputy to then-gadget-boss Mark McClusky. McClusky now runs the company’s website, under new editor in chief Scott Dadich.

Gawker Media owner Nick Denton hasn’t named a replacement for Brown, who ran the site for the last two years; veteran Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson will lead a search for a new editor. “We’re looking for someone with design background,” Denton said.

This one seems like an amicable Denton/editor breakup. Here’s Brown’s take, delivered via IM (he’s still a Gawker employee, after all): “I’ve had an amazing few years at Gizmodo — the team here is among the best in any business, and I love them like family. But I am pumped about going home to Wired. With Scott and the team he’s put in place, it’s like we’re getting the band back together.” (Update: And here’s more from Brown, who is also an extremely patient Pai Gow poker tutor.)

And here’s more from Denton, also via IM (because, see above): “Gizmodo began as the online embodiment of the Fetish section of Wired. And it’s a good time to recover that central purpose: the cataloging of beautiful things. Especially with image annotation on the new Kinja platform. Applications for [the] EIC role should go to joel At gizmodo dot com.”

But the Reddit crew seems to delight in flouting convention, so it also makes sense that there’s a twist to the funding round that’s currently under way.

As TechCrunch reported, the social news site is raising money at a $400 million valuation. But people familiar with the company say Reddit is only raising a fraction of the money it could — most likely about $1 million. And it only wants the cash from certain influential angel investors.

Why not raise more? For starters, because the company doesn’t need it: When Conde Nast and its parent company Advance Publications spun out Reddit as an independent company in 2011, the social site had $20 million in the bank. Since Reddit is able to generate a ton of traffic with a very lean staff, it still has most of that money, around $18 million.

Instead of capital, I’m told that what Reddit CEO Yishan Wong is really looking for is buy-in, and input, from Silicon Valley’s elite investors.

And any angel who does put money in is likely more interested in something other than a financial return. If Reddit figures out a scalable business model, it could well be worth much more than $400 million. But it’s also unlikely to be the ginormous home run that a small investor can get if they bet correctly on a bona fide startup, when their (relatively) modest contribution can buy them a real stake.

I also assume that Wong will be able to find no shortage of wealthy, brainy tech folks willing to write checks and offer advice. I’ve asked Wong for comment, and will update if I get it.

Not more than two weeks after Chris Anderson announced he was leaving tech publication Wired after an 11-year tenure as editor in chief, Conde Nast has named a successor.

Conde Nast creative director Scott Dadich will assume the position, returning to the tech publication at which he formerly served as creative director from 2006 to 2010.

“I’m excited to return to Wired, which has had such a tremendous impact on my life and my career,” Dadich said in a statement released Friday morning. “I look forward to finding new opportunities to delight and surprise the Wired community, both with the stories we tell, and in the ways that we tell them.”

That last part is important. Dadich was responsible for leading Conde Nast — which is traditionally known for its legacy print titles — into the digital age with the release of the Wired iPad app. Ostensibly, Dadich will continue to focus on bringing together Wired’s three publishing mediums — print, tablet, and on the Web at Wired.com.

A bit of disclosure: I worked for Wired up until about six months ago, when I left to join AllThingsD, though I missed Scott’s tenure by a matter of months.

Dadich is regarded highly within Conde, though, so it’s a pretty big appointment back at the publisher’s flagship technology publication. And, considering Dadich’s background overseeing all of Conde’s digital publishing channels over the past two years, it certainly speaks to Wired’s digital focus going forward.

“Reddit was spun off a year ago, and it operates as an independent company. Conde Nast has no involvement in the management of Reddit.”

– Advance.net chairman Steven Newhouse, in response to a query from AllThingsD regarding today’s Gawker story about Reddit and a user described as “The Biggest Troll on the Web.” Advance.net is the digital arm of Conde Nast parent Advance Publications; Advance remains Reddit’s majority shareholder, Newhouse confirmed.

AllThingsD has learned that the minority investment comes from Spectrum Equity, known for investing in other deals, such as SurveyMonkey and Ancestry.com.

Neither company immediately returned calls seeking comment. But according to sources familiar with the deal, some of the cash will be used to fund the company’s growth, while a portion of it will be used to buy out existing shareholders.

WeddingWire provides an online directory for couples seeking information about local vendors, including photographers, venues, caterers and florists. It sells ads to businesses, and generates recurring revenue by helping vendors build mobile sites, as well as providing them with tools that help them manage appointments online, among other things.

In 2007, the five-year-old company in Bethesda, Md., raised $5.5 million from Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. Four years later, Martha Stewart sold its stake to Catalyst Investors for $11 million. Sources would not disclose the company’s valuation, but based on the size of today’s investment, you can guess it’s in the range of $50 million to $100 million. WeddingWire is profitable today.

This year, Inc. magazine named WeddingWire the 309th fastest-growing private company. According to that information, the company’s 2011 revenue totaled $10.1 million, up 1,200 percent over the past three years. It has 100 employees.

Last year, WeddingWire acquired ProjectWedding.com from eHarmony, and today it is powering listings for sites owned by Martha Stewart and Condé Nast. According to the company’s Web site, it is expanding into adjacent verticals, such as EventWire.com, MitzvahWire.com and PromWire.com, among others. Competitors include Yelp and wedding-specific sites like TheKnot.com.

Question No. 2: It was really no big deal, says Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, via email:

There’s not a lot to it. I’ve gotten to know quite a few folks in the WH & Obama campaign team over the years and it was always something I brought up when I got the chance. There are quite a few redditors at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave and at the campaign HQ — given the prominence of reddit, it’s an easy sell.

Questions 2A, 2B, 2C: It’s not really that easy, is it? When did you start talking about this for real? Any special conditions on this one?

Years ago, but that was being rather ambitious. It started coming up from their side over the last year or so. A little while ago we randomly get a ping saying “POTUS is doing an AMA.” Nothing different about this, except for keeping it a secret. Also, the President only has thirty minutes or so to answer questions, which we made sure they said up front, because it’s pretty reasonable given his dayjob (we can’t all spend our days reading reddit).

Next up, Romney?

Question No. 3: The Reddit site seems to be holding up okay — over on Twitter, I’m seeing some griping about the site buckling under the traffic load, but presumably the Reddit gang anticipated the surge.

Question No. 4: Obama and his team also seem to know what they’ve gotten themselves into. Reddit’s AMA format is famously unruly and free-wheeling. But so far Obama seems to be handling it just fine. After all, it’s up to him to figure out which questions he wants to answer — if he doesn’t want an uncomfortable “boxers or briefs” moment, he can control that. Not surprisingly, every answer he’s offered up so far has been studiously on-message.

Hi, I’m Barack Obama, President of the United States. Ask me anything. I’ll be taking your questions for half an hour starting at about 4:30 ET.

– The current occupant of the White House, doing some savvy counter-programming on the Internet, via Reddit’s Ask Me Anything Q&A format.

The twist: This one is from Ken’s son Ben, and his dude-centric Thrillist Media Group empire.

Oak is leading a $13 million round for the newsletter/e-commerce company, along with the Lerers’ own Lerer Ventures and Bob Pittman’s Pilot Group. It’s just the second round Thrillist has used since Lerer started the company in 2005, when he was backed by $2 million from Pilot.

It used to be tempting to write Ben Lerer off as a privileged kid playing around in start-up land. Seven years later, that has become a very hard argument to make.

Thrillist started out as a Daily-Candy-newsletter-for-dudes, but has since branched into e-commerce with the 2010 acquisition of Jackthreads, a Gilt-Groupe-for-dudes. Lerer says the combined company is on track to make a profit on $60 million in revenue this year. And while he won’t disclose a valuation for the new round, my hunch is that it’s more than two times those revenues — at least $120 million.

The new version of Thrillist is now more e-commerce than media business, with about 65 percent of its revenue coming from Jackthreads. And many pure-play e-commerce companies have been struggling recently (see this excellent Chris Dixon post about the industry’s challenges).

But Lerer plans to plow a bunch of the new money into an M&A plan focused on media sites, so he can build out that part of the business again.

The idea: Find more dude-ish sites that would compliment the food, booze and clothes verticals Thrillist already covers — like gadgets and travel. Cue requisite go-big-or-go-home mission plan: “What we’re looking at is, what does Condé Nast look like if it starts today?”

Meanwhile, we should point out that this is Harman’s second Lerer investment this year: He has also invested in a $5 million round for the Web news start-up Ken and Ben are backing, which is supposed to launch soonish.

Harman didn’t want to talk about that one, which is still in semi-stealth mode (and apparently won’t be called Planet Daily) but he was happy to jump on the phone and talk up the merits of the Lerers in general and Thrillist in particular.

Thrillist is intriguing enough, Harman said, that he was willing to buy less than his standard 20 percent to 30 percent stake with his investment.

“It’s a departure, but I was was so enthralled with the direction Ben is headed with this venture,” Harman said. “I think they’re pioneering a lot of things around the edge of the media business model that I’m quite fascinated with.”

The game, called Fashion Hazard, challenges players to walk down catwalks in New York, London, Paris and Milan. But unlike other girly games that mostly focus on playing dress-up, this game requires players to swipe, tilt and tap their phones to collect coins while also dodging random obstacles in the way.

Objects often include hissing snakes, old-school stereos or other models. And if walking in stilettos wasn’t difficult enough, the players also occasionally get splashed with paint, obscuring their vision (maybe they were wearing fur?).

Juliana Stock, Condé Nast’s senior director of business and product development for its interactive product group, said she got the idea watching her 11-year-old daughter enjoying action games, “and yet, when we started to look at action and adventure with her interests in mind, which are girly, we didn’t find any.”

Stock said: “There was a need in the market to create an action game that was challenging, and yet still feminine and visually appealing to this demographic.”

She said they plan to continue to fully support it with more content updates for every season, and in the future, could advise other Condé Nast brands on how to make games. The game costs 99 cents and players will be able to purchase additional items, like wallpapers and ringtones, from the virtual boutique.

To help with promoting the game, Condé Nast has partnered with Frenzoo, which has developed a “Me Girl” game series. The two companies will create special challenges that players in each other’s games will have to complete in order to win special bonuses. For example, in Frenzoo’s Style Me Girl game, players will be invited to dress their avatars up for a Fashion Hazard runway show. Additional promotions, including social media efforts and a sweepstakes, will launch later this month.

Here’s a trailer for the game:

Fashion Hazard 2012 from Fashion Hazard on Vimeo.

But Visible Measures makes money doing something else. For the last year, it has been running a Web video ad network, where it charges advertisers each time someone chooses to watch one of its spots.*

Now it has more money to build that business out. The Boston-based company has raised a $21.5 million round, led by previous investor DAG Ventures, along with earlier backers like General Catalyst and Conde Nast parent Advance Publications. Some new money also came into the company via Common Fund.

That brings total funding for the 7-year-old company to more than $65 million; CEO Brian Shin says a “little bit” of the new round went back to existing equity owners via secondary sales.

*In the Web ad world, that’s called the “cost per view” model, and while it seems completely commonsensical, it’s a relatively new idea. The business-as-usual version: If a publisher/network can prove that someone saw an ad, whether they wanted to or not, they get credit for the view. Hence: Lots of crappy pre-roll ads, and even crappier “auto-play” ads. This is when it’s good to point out that the video ad business is ridiculously primitive.

If you’ve used the New Yorker’s iPad app, then you’ll have a very good sense of what you’re getting here: All of the magazine’s content, along with a small handful of digital goodies, delivered to your device via Apple’s Newsstand.

Access is free for print subscribers, or you can buy a digital-only subscription that includes iPad and iPhone access; you can also buy individual issues. Publisher Conde Nast is giving away this week’s edition free, so you can try it out yourself.

Putting a magazine on the iPhone makes perfect sense for people like me, who do a ton of reading on the handset (our family iPad is pretty much relegated to Netflix delivery/babysitting duties). But it’s a departure for Conde Nast, which has generally tried to keep its digital replicas confined to iPads and other tablets.*

Beyond the obvious news, there is something interesting happening behind the scenes for people who track app development. After nearly two years, Conde and Adobe, who built the publisher’s app platform, have finally figured out how to handle “paginated HTML,” which means the app can now handle text as … text. Instead of giant image files.

Short version: The iPhone version of the New Yorker will be a lot easier to download than the iPad version.

This week’s edition, for instance, will weigh in at 23 megabytes, while the iPad versions have been going well over 100MB a pop. And the New Yorker will now be able to use the same tech to give the iPad version a slim-down, says Deputy Editor Pam McCarthy, who handles the apps.

Meanwhile, if you’re reading this, you really don’t need a video explaining how or why you should use the app. (It’s not 2010.) But I’m so glad that the New Yorker commissioned Lena Dunham to make one, anyway. Here’s the “Girls” auteur, along with Mad Man Jon Hamm, and some awesome pants.

*The same goes for most of the publishing business, though I think that’s changing, and will certainly accelerate if phones get bigger and/or tablets shrink.

The search giant announced at its Google I/O conference that it is adding movie purchases, TV shows and magazines to its Google Play store.

Previously, you could only rent movies from the storefront, but now you can buy them, as well. Google has also worked with such studios as ABC, NBC Universal and Sony Pictures to bring “thousands of episodes” of broadcast and cable TV shows, including hits like “Breaking Bad” and “30 Rock.”

Users will be able to play back movies and TV shows on all Android devices, with support for Google TV coming soon.

In addition to reading books, Android users can peruse their favorite magazines; some sample titles include Bon Appetit, Esquire, Conde Nast Traveler and Popular Science. But the magazines are not interactive like the digital editions found on the iPad. Instead, they are stripped down PDF versions like those you find on the Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble Nook.

The new content is available today through the Web-based store, and will roll out to Google Play on devices over the coming days.

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What’s particularly interesting here is the company that accounted for $10 million of the round — Conde Nast’s parent company, Advance Publications.

The money for the deal comes from a $500 million fund Advance set up a couple years ago, which is managed by former Yahoo M&A executive Andrew Siegel. Siegel will take a seat on Unified’s board.

The rest of the round comes via a debt deal with Silicon Valley Bank. The start-up had previously raised about $1.5 million in an angel round.

Unified will function as a media-buying service for advertisers, if that’s what their clients want. But the company is trying to emphasize its analytics/dashboard services, which is supposed to help advertisers figure out how their ad buys are performing across multiple platforms.

Like other social marketing start-ups, the bulk of its business comes from Facebook, but it will also work with Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.

Here’s an explainer/teaser video featuring a woman with a Madonna-like British accent:

Condé wouldn’t disclose a purchase price but people familiar with the transaction tell me it’s around $14 million. That number includes earnouts for some of the two-year-old company’s employees.

So no, it’s no Instagram. But it’s still significant for Condé to spend money buying new digital stuff. And the company intends to buy more, says president Bob Sauerberg: “We’re out there looking.”

At the end of 2010, Condé’s parent company Advance Publications announced that it had set up a $500 million M&A kitty and hired former Yahoo executive Andrew Siegel to run the fund.

ZipList, which lets users find recipes online and assemble shopping lists which they can sync to their iPhone and Android phones, will continue to operate as a standalone brand. But Sauerberg says Condé will integrate the service with its existing online food brands, like Epicurious. “Think of Condé Nast as one of ZipList’s first new customers,” he said.

ZipList already has integrations with other publishers, including Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. Martha Stewart was also an investor in Ziplist, along with Softbank Capital. The start-up raised a reported $4.5 million, which means investors will get their money back on this one, likely with a modest return.

The pitch is simple and intuitive: All the magazines you want, delivered digitally to your tablet, for a flat fee of either $10 or $15 a month.

There are catches, of course, and we’ll get to them in a minute. But the thrust of what NIM and its publishers are trying to do here is heartening, because it shows that they’re willing to experiment, for real.

They’re keeping their core business model — curated bundles of content sponsored primarily by advertising. But they’re making a key concession by not requiring consumers to make a commitment to any particular title and letting them swap out magazines at will.

Not a coincidence: Two years after the iPad launched, consumers have only shown a mild interest in tablet magazines — digital represents just 1 percent of the industry’s circulation. Publishers need to do something.

Now, on to the catches. The good news is that most of these are solvable. The bad news is that there are a few, and for now, they’re big:

• The digital magazines require an app that will only work on Android tablets running Honeycomb. Next Issue says it will submit a version to Apple soon and hopes to have it available this summer. No word on Amazon’s Kindle Fire or Barnes & Noble’s Nook, which run earlier — and heavily modified — versions of Google’s operating system.
• You can’t get any magazine you want: Just 32 titles from the four magazine publishers in Next Issue’s joint venture: Hearst, Meredith, Time Inc. and Conde Nast. (News Corp., which also owns this Web site, is a Next Issue backer, but hasn’t put anything it owns into this offering.) That said, the list includes lots of the publishers’ best-known titles: Sports Illustrated, Fortune, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Esquire, Elle, Better Homes and Gardens, etc. Next Issue says it will add more “later this year,” and also plans to bring outside publishers into the offering.
• If you like reading magazines in both print and digital form, this offer won’t work for you. While publishers have recently started bundling print and digital subscriptions for the same price — essentially giving away digital in exchange for full-priced print subscriptions — these deals don’t include any print issues at all.

But for all of that, there’s plenty here to be optimistic about, whether you’re a magazine maker or a magazine reader.

Publishers have struggled to figure out how to take advantage of the iPad and other tablets, and for now they’ve ended up with something that looks and works almost exactly like a paper magazine, with a couple digital bells and whistles.

That’s not a terrible thing — some of the tablet issues work well, and publishers tell me they think they are selling them to new readers, which is a good thing.

But for two years there haven’t been many compelling reasons to pick up a tablet issue instead of a print one. Changing the basic subscription proposition, though? That makes things very interesting.

It’s also very much an experiment, which is the word every publisher I talked to about the launch used in the last couple days. “No one has done this before, and there are lots of practical reasons for that,” says Hearst’s John Loughlin, who oversees the publisher’s tablet efforts.

And publishers still have basic stuff to figure out, like how they’ll get paid for their titles. The rough idea is that they’ll get a share of revenue based on the amount of time consumers spend with their magazines, but they still need to hash out details.

The same goes for conversations about circulation and advertising. Right now, for instance, the magazines you read when you give Next Issue $10 a month (if you want monthly titles — if you want weeklies like the New Yorker, it’s $15 a month) won’t be counted in publishers’ official totals.

But all of that sounds good to me. It sounds like an industry ready to try some stuff and see what works. Just like all the start-ups that insist they want to disrupt it.

“Anybody that tells you that they have the answer, or that their model is the model that would be successful 5 years from now — they’d be suspect,” says Loughlin. “We’re very much in a learning mode.”