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."

Comments

Too broad?

[sterno]

What magazine were you reading? It seemed to me that, for the most part, it had very lefty anti-establishment bent. Occasionally they'd throw a bit of right-wing in there just to keep people on their toes but I think it had a pretty clear bent.

RIe:f*ckedcompany.com already has their 20....

[Anonymous Coward]

It has. Several times. One time I remember was when pud put up a porn site. He thought that it would be nice to do custom porn movies. It didn't work. He took it down after a short time. There have been other times, too.

Go to the site and do a search.

Of course, look at k5

[Skim123]

The handwriting was on the wall when they adopted the subscription model. Most people aren't willing or even able to pay for content

Of course when a site develops a real sense of loyalty and community, simply asking for a donation can yield a healthy sum of money - kuro5hin.org, for example, raised over $37,000 in two days.

While such a model is obviously not going to cover Salon's $11 million annual expense, it is an intriguing idea. Granted, I doubt it would work for Salon, it seems like such a proposition would work only for tightly-knit community oriented sites.