Slashdot Mirror
Specs of Salons Subscription System
legLess writes "Scott Rosenburg, Salon's VP of operations, wrote an interesting article for Web Techniques about Salon's subscription system. It goes into a fair amount of technical detail (JavaBeans and JSP on Linux for login and authentication; Perl, HTML::Mason and MySQL (CD: and oracle) for content). He also talks about their subscription numbers, what drove them to do it, and their plans for the future (technical and operational). A little fluffy, but still a good read."
my biggest point of annoyance with the site was when they took their news coverage out of the free portion of the site. they chose a moment when everyone around the world needed good, accurate reporting of the developing events after 9/11, and exploited that moment to expand their subscriber base. that should have been the moment when they kept everything open and freely available, perhaps soliciting for donations to keep the quality of coverage up. instead, they chose the greedy road and shut a lot of people off from a good information source.
"Why is all this crap here?" -- 4-year-old Brandon
After reading this article, I begin to see why it will be doubly tough for Slashdot to make the jump to subscription-based revenue.
The biggest problem I see with Slashdot is that Slashdot doesn't have a Cringely or a Coursey or a Dvorak. Sure, Slashot has Jon Katz, but I just don't find his articles as readable as a Cringley column or a Dvorak rant.
I see the real difference between Slashdot and Salon on a couple of other fronts as well. Besides not having several columns by intersting authors, most of Slashdot's content is made interesting by the readers, not by the story submitters. Personally, I am horrified by both the obvious lack of attention given to grammar, as well as the oft-biased one-liners added by the story submitters. Finally, although it has gotten better in recent times, Slashdot seems to crash a lot... even more than an overloaded MySQL database would suggest.
For Slashdot to take a viable community and turn it profitable, the story editors do a lot more than Salon did. The fact remains that Salon's content is mostly unique, whereas Slashdot's content (in terms of story submissions) is mostly regurgitated. Salon's readers will pay because it's hard to find Salon-like articles anywhere else. On the other hand, I can honestly say that if ZDNet had a moderation system, I'd only rarely visit Slashdot. ZDNet's columnists keep me entertained, and their news is grammatically correct and up-to-date because they pay people to go out and write it.
It all boils down to whether Slashdot can successfully differentiate itself from the hundreds of other "Cool Linux Stories" sites. In the end, what keeps Slashdot's readers coming back is the discussion and the attached moderation system. What remains to be seen is whether or not people will pay for that.
I find the news coverage on Salon to be broad and uncensored. Usually, I peruse foreign newspapers (German FAZ, British news, Times of India, English version of Pravda, etc.) at least once a week to get a broader view of what is going on in the world. I find much of the same news in Salon.
Don't misunderstand me: I am fairly conservative (voted for George W.), but I still realize that huge corporations in the US own the news media so, for example, lot's of anti-globalization news is not covered in the US.
BTW, there is porn on Salon? I haven't seen it.
-Mark
From previous postings on this site, it seems that Slashdot will be going to subscription route as well. I think its a good idea.
I'm all for improved discourse, and I'd be disappointed if Slashdot had trouble staying afloat, but I don't agree that a subscription-based revenue model would improve the quality of the site.
Not too long ago, Salon's "Table Talk" message board was a great place to find reasonably intelligent talk. There were no trolls, and it seemed that most everybody could spell.
Then, sometime in the past year but I'm not sure when, Salon took their message board to a subscription-only model. Anybody can read, but only paying subscribers can post. It's not expensive, either; something on the order of six bucks a month, I think?
The result? The boards that I used to frequent on Table Talk are now ghost towns. Tumbleweeds and cow skulls, and Yul Brynner wandering around dressed all in black.
I, too, used to think that taking Slashdot to a read-for-free, pay-for-post model would be a good thing, keeping some of the riffraff out. But I don't think so any more.
I used to use Encyclopedia Britannica once in a while. But now, I can't use it at all because it's a pay site. I can't justify paying a subscription when I might use it once or twice a month.
I currently pay to subscribe to one on-line content provider : Cooks Illustrated. Its worth it to me. Salon might be worth it to me, too, but I don't buy it. As more and more sites go pay-for-play, I'm not going to be subscribing to dozens of sites. 1) I am only a casual reader, and 2) even if I thought it was worth it, I'm not going to pay hundreds of dollars a month to keep up with all the sites I visit.
And here's where it starts to break down: the (commercial) web can end up just like print media. Sure, any print publication could be subscribed to by everyone, but everyone is not going to subscribe to everything, or even one thing. So you have your subscribers, and you don't reach anyone else.
I know that Salon Premium pretty much drove me away from Salon. I accept that in the future, I will be much more limited web site availability. I'm willing to pay that price because all that casual content isn't worth the thousands of dollars it would cost to maintain subscriptions.
Micropayments, anyone?
Robotiq.com is heavily tested on animals
I don't think the problem is lack of people willing to generate content, it's the fact that putting that content on the 'net requires bandwith, which, as has been pointed out, requires money. Bandwith has the further problem of not getting any cheaper.
Take spinsanity.org... great site, great weekly e-mail and for a long time, fairly small time. Now they are getting popular and getting press time, and now they are getting strapped for cash. They had to open up the path ways for people to make donations to pay for bandwith. They were perfectly happy to make the content for free... it's providing the content that is getting to them.
If you liked their Big Brother coverage, you should try the Survivor coverage, which continues even now into season three. I've read all of these, but I've never actually seen the show except the two season finales. It was funny to match up the characters to their lampooned caricatures from Salon.
They're at:
http://www.salon.com/ent/tv/survivor3/index.html
(The season three updates are at the bottom)
Here's one of my favorite parts:
Linda, the Cambridge woman who beat cancer, is a little peeved at some of the jokes -- someone had made a crack about an African word that sounded like "tampon." "This is mother Africa to me," she says. "They're so disrespectful. This is where is all started, folks, in Africa!"
In Linda's book, participating in a silly reality show for a million-dollar prize is an appropriately respectful activity in mother Africa.
- /. had more original news pieces
- Jon Katz wrote something worth reading
- Paying members could turn off all ThinkGeek ads (et. all)
- The moderators were fair [troll]
- Paying users could turn OFF the Cowboyneil option in polls
Sapere Aude - Homer
May be a little unrelated but can't stop myself from offering my own comments on the cost associated with subscription
Slate.com which competes for the same market as Salon ran a subscription experiment couple of years back. They ended up signing about 26000 subscribers. They were charging only $19.95/year, which is a pretty low price point considering that it was costing several times that much, even on the very best campaign, to acquire a subscriber. The cost of acquisition was averaging between $50 and $100, so obviously Slate was losing money on every subscriber we signed up.
Eventually, they decided to go free again.
Slate has only 40 employees while Salon has double the number - I therefore except their costs to much more.
I think even with the $72/year that Salon is charging
they are losing money. I would be suprised if they switch back to being a free ad-based site.