Thomas, who was previously an editor with Business 2.0, was brought in to run Valleywag in June 2007, replacing the head of Gawker Media, Nick Denton. Denton’s run as the editor of Valleywag came only after he fired Nick Douglas from the same job.

We hear Thomas is going to work for NBC on some kind of site which may or may not be centered around the Valley as well. [Update below, Denton has confirmed Owen's NBC gig.]

We’ve just contacted Thomas who declined to comment at this time.

Update: Gabriel Synder, the editor of Gawker, has confirmed the news and had this to say:

While I’m sorry to see Owen leave, I’m still committed to keeping Valleywag going as Gawker’s tech column.

Snyder continued that while he couldn’t say who will be brought in to replace Thomas, there will be a new editor of Valleywag and the site will definitely not be shuttered.

“Owen’s been great through this entire transition and has set the template for how coverage of the tech beat can fit into Gawker,” Snyder went on to say.

Update 2: Here’s Gawker founder Nick Denton on the move:

Owen has a reputation as a fearsome gossip writer. What’s less known is his penchant for management. It sounds like this NBC job will give him the responsibility he’s been craving — and take him out of the Valleywag firing line! We’re replacing him internally. More on that later.

NBC may be building out a bunch of local sites, Denton says, which Thomas would be a part of.

Denton went on to say that Gawker’s Q1 revenue numbers have been strong, up 27% from the year ago period. Of Valleywag specifically, he would only say that it’s sold under Gawker.com, so it’s not separated out for things like ad sales anymore, apparently. Gawker is down from 15 to 9 sites now after it shed a bunch last year, but he says the majority of the revenue came from those 9 sites anyway. He adds that they’ve been growing, even during the downturn.

Update 3: Gawker has just confirmed that the new editor of Valleywag will be Ryan Tate (pictured, right). Tate had been serving as Gawker’s night editor, as well as contributing some of his work to Valleywag. Gawker is now seeking a night editor to replace him.

Update 4: Beet.TV’s Andy Plesser has the story on Thomas’ new gig. Apparently, he’ll be the managing editor of NBC Bay Area, a news site focused just on the Bay Area that is in beta right now. As Plesser notes, this will make Thomas an employee of GE (which owns NBC).

[Owen Thomas photograph by Benjamin Tice Smith]

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Nick suggests that the partnership just sort of petered out. But he also says that Nick Douglas’s regular attacks at Valleywag (a Gawker blog) on Lloyd Braun, head of Yahoo Media, didn’t help matters much. I imagine he might be right.

In addition to their recent deal to promote their content within Yahoo, Gawker today announced the launch of its newest blog, The Consumerist, a humorous slant on today’s consumptive world:

“We here at Gawker Media love to spend our money, but we hate being treated like cattle while we do it. And so our big happy family is proud to announce the birth of our latest site: Consumerist, our answer to the utter fuckitude of modern capitalism.”

Edited by Joel Johnson, who formerly wrote Gizmodo, The Consumerist is off to a strong start with posts such as “Gay Wallet Follies” and “Lenovo’s Free Thinkpad Battery Bait and Switch“.

The Consumerist has a full, ad supported feed and a partial, no ads feed.

The financial terms are undisclosed, but here’s what is now on Yahoo: Gawker brands and content are pushed throughout the news home page. Clicking on associated content pulls up a Yahoo page with the Gawker content (example). It does NOT redirect to Gawker.

There is a single link to Gawker on the content page (clicking on the brand name). Otherwise, it’s an all-Yahoo experience. If I was doing the deal, I’d expect a revenue split in Yahoo’s favor on ad revenue generated from the page. Gawker gets that revenue, the branding, and some links directly to the blog. This is purely speculation, but my best guess.

Is this an important deal? Yes, in that it shows Yahoo embracing blog content. The guy at Yahoo to get to know is clearly Scott Moore, named by Wired in their last print edition as VP Content Operations. Scott is hiring bloggers (such as Kevin Sites) and doing these kinds of deals with Gawker. These are smart deals for Yahoo – they generate page views where they can put lots of ads. If the deals are revenue share, then it’s a no lose proposition for Yahoo.

But what Yahoo is noticeably not doing is acquiring Gawker, like AOL did with Weblogs, Inc. That means liquidity events for bloggers are limited – the GYMs (Google-Yahoo-Microsoft) are not yet in content buying moods.

So perhaps the networks and very large blogs can cut deals to increase page views on content and generate revenue. Will this model work for the long or medium tail of blog content? My guess is no…the GYMs will want to control quality and that doesn’t scale with more than a small number of blogs. But certainly we’ll see more deals like this, particularly as long as the advertising market is strong and demand for inventory is outstripping supply. The portals need content, and this is a cheap way to get it.

A lot of people are focusing on the fact that the deal is incorporating blog content directly into Yahoo news results. While I find this interesting, we’ve already seen Yahoo experiment with this with their blog search product. Clearly Yahoo is defining the definition of news to include blogs (as they should), and I applaud this.

But back to the title of this post. Is it an interesting deal? Yes, but mostly because of what the deal isn’t – it isn’t an aquisition of Gawker.

Read more analysis of the deal at Read/Write Web, Paid Content and Memeorandum.