• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, August 16, 2016

The Gawker Media auction is heating up with a new bid from Univision, challenging the initial “stalking horse” bid submitted by Ziff Davis when the auction was first announced in June of this year, according to Forbes, which first reported the news.

Also, online women’s lifestyle publisher LittleThings announced it is bidding for Gawker Media’s Jezebel, which targets millennial women with political, cultural, and lifestyle coverage.

Univision Holdings is bidding an undisclosed amount for Gawker Media, according to a separate report from Reuters, citing several unnamed individuals familiar with the auction process. However, to be competitive with Ziff Davis’ earlier bid of $90 million, it must presumably be near nine figures as well.

Reuters notes that bankers representing Gawker have shopped the media company around to dozens of buyers, suggesting there may be limited appetite for property mired in legal woes.

Gawker is in the midst of a drawn-out court battle with professional wrestler and reality TV personality Terry Gene Bollea, better known as Hulk Hogan. Bollea sued Gawker Media for invasion of privacy after the flagship site of the same name published part of a sex tape he claims was made without his knowledge.

In March, a Florida jury awarded him a total of $140 million in damages. It was subsequently revealed that Bollea launched the lawsuit with financial backing from Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, whom Gawker angered by revealing he was gay back in 2007.

While Gawker’s lawyers are appealing the ruling, in the near term, the judgment forced the site to declare bankruptcy in June, when the stalking horse bid by Ziff Davis, publisher of PC Magazine, was also announced.

For Univision, the move is just the latest in a series of acquisitions and investments by the Spanish-language broadcaster as it seeks to bolster its reach among younger audiences. Back in January, for example, the broadcaster acquired a 40% controlling stake in satirical comedy news site The Onion, and last year it bought The Root, a publisher targeting millennial African-Americans.

Separatel,  LittleThings announced its own $10 million bid for Jezebel on Tuesday, touting the combination’s potential to increase the company’s reach among millennial women, given the low overlap between their existing audiences.

LittleThings co-founder and CEO Joe Speiser noted: “There is tremendous synergy between LittleThings and Jezebel as both sites skew heavy female, however there is little reader duplication. According to comScore, shared audience is only 2.37 million monthly unique visitors, so the incremental increase in monthly traffic is very appealing to us.”

LittleThings has roughly 50 million unique visitors per month, according to Speiser, while Jezebel attracts 10 million monthly readers.