Slashdot Mirror


Salon in Dire Straits

An anonymous reader submits this well-linked blurb: "It appears the end may be near for Salon Media Group. Their auditors doubt the company can stay in business for very much longer. Despite recently reaching nearly 40,000 subscribers, they haven't been able to make up for lost ad revenue in a down market. As a result, they've accumulated a deficit of about $75 million. Their best known asset, besides Salon.com, may be The Well, one of the earliest and most influential online communities. I hope that it can survive if Salon does not."

3 of 419 comments (clear)

  1. What department? by TheFrood · · Score: 5, Funny

    Salon in Dire Straits

    from the partying-like-it's-salon1999 dept.


    You actually went with this over "from the can't-get-your-money-for-nothing dept."?

    TheFrood

    --
    If you say "I'll probably get modded down for this..." then I will mod you down.
  2. Remember.... by SomeOtherGuy · · Score: 4, Funny

    That movie "Brewsters Millions"? (He had to spend so much cash in a short period of time in order to inherit much more cash with certain stipulations...) I don't think most people could blow $75 Meeeelion dollars even on a real company without turning some sort of profit along the way....Hell you would make all these crazy expenditures -- and you would start to get customers and sale products by accident somewhere around $25 Million...:) Hell you could create a business selling tumbleweeds or rocks and dirt delivered from the arizona desert in little baggies on the concord -- and one day a busload of Japanese tourists would show up at the doorstep....errrr....I ain't gonna make my quota of losing $75 million if these damn busses keep showing up!!! Ahhh....Lets take this business online if we really want to lose some big money....But damn....we have a product --- the tumbleweeds are flying of the shelf....we are overnighting these things to Japan on the Space Shuttle and still only $43 million in the hole....

    Sorry -- I am no business man....But fail to see how a website can spend that kind of dough....(I am sure bandwidth and server costs are only a drop in the bucket.....) And what does this say about the 40K people who have paid??? That is real income --- yet they still can't make money....

    --
    (+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
  3. Re:Charging for content sealed Salon's fate by foobar104 · · Score: 4, Funny

    The three sure-fire ways to get your comment moderated as "insightful."

    1. Criticize Microsoft in a way that's slightly different from the way everybody else is criticizing them today.

    2. Tell the story-- truthful or otherwise-- of how you replaced some proprietary and expensive computer system with one based on Linux.

    3. Give moderately detailed instructions on how to find good pr0n.