Denton wouldn’t comment on the sale of Consumerist, an advocacy site with attitude that he put on the block last month. And he would only confirm that Defamer, his attempt to break into Hollywood coverage, is for sale.

But I’m told that Consumerist may have fetched something in the “mid-six figure range,” and that a logical buyer for Defamer would be BuzzNet, the pop culture blog network that picked up Denton’s Idolator music site earlier this year.

When the Defamer sale is complete, Denton will have nine blogs left, down from a high of 15. He has also laid off staff, reduced compensation and is trying to force vendors to cut their fees–and generally followed most of the playbook he published this fall in his “doom-mongering” memo.

Last month, Denton boasted about record revenues. But he says that December sales are poor–as they have been across much of the Web world.

UPDATE: Here’s a comment from Nick, who objects to my use of the verb “shrink” in my first paragraph. He suggests “prune” as an alternative: “The six sites we’ve put up for sale or merged this year represent about a tenth of our total page views. Our core properties–Gizmodo, Gawker, Kotaku, Jezebel, Lifehacker, io9, Fleshbot, Jalopnik and Deadspin–make up for that in about two months of growth.” And he notes that Gawker Media pageviews are up 67 percent, to 259 million, in November, according to Quantcast.

FiLife, the personal finance site co-owned by IAC (IACI) and Dow Jones, has a new boss. The company has brought in Ezra Kucharz, formerly an executive at online games company Oberon Media and at NBC’s iVillage, as president.

He replaces Dave Kansas, a business news veteran. Kansas will stay on as an editor-at-large and has a personal finance book due out in January.

FiLife, which is supposed to be geared toward young folks who spend more time browsing the Web than looking at their 401(k), has had a short but troubled existence. It finally launched in June, after more than a year of fits and starts. It was originally supposed to have lots of blog-like entries from professional writers, and eventually moved into a more service-oriented comparison shopping engine for financial products.

You could argue that economic turmoil could make a site like this particularly valuable for its target audience, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

Compare the performance of the site with Consumerist.com, a Gawker Media blog that’s now up for sale.

Full disclosure: Dow Jones is a unit of News Corp. (NWS), which also owns this Web site. If you’d like even more disclosure, see here.