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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."
A site like Salon, as excellent as it is/was, simply cannot make it by charging for content. Other then porn, content isn't something people will pay for on the web, especially what are basically magazine articles.
If Salon was serious about surviving, it should have canned it expensive SF offices and become basically a virtual company. Web space is cheap, and writer can live anywhere.
Too bad they couldn't see the obvious.
Maybe I don't understand business as much as I think I do, but whatever happened to growing a business. All these (especially internet) business that take a boatload of cash and thy to "hatch themselves into the world" fully grown keep going bust. How does a website that only hosts articles get many millions of dollars in debt before turning a profit? It's not like they have warehouses of inventory to maintain. It's a freekin' server cluster the content management and writers. Half the people reading this could probably build the business infrastructure in a month or so.
Marketing costs? Ok, ya got me there, but that many millions worth? How much are they paying their writers? How much Salon content couldn't they have hired english major to write at a fraction of the cost?
I think the world needs to start going back to "building businesses", which has become a lost art. Make the model work...THEN take it to the multi-million level. Not throw in millions, then figure out a model that works.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Other then porn, content isn't something people will pay for on the web, especially what are basically magazine articles.
I disagree. I think people are not willing to pay the subscription on a regular basis in seamingly large amounts (even $5 a month per site is too much). But if it was a few cents here and there for an article or for a page of posts, people would be much more willing to pay. We need micropayments, and we need them bad. What I don't understand is why they still haven't appeared and spread, the market for them should be huge. The only explanation for it that I've seen makes me sad...
Is there something outside the marketability of political orientation that is a factor in this difference in success? Does political orientation give a business an advantage in a Capitalistic society? Or is it that Republicans are just looser with their wallets?
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Most of Salon's expensives come from actually paying well-respected and well-written authors.
Writers (professional writers, which you are clearly are not) do not work for free. Good writers (which Salon has in arguably larger numbers than ANY other news-op-ed-online-only publication) are very very expensive.
So it's more likely than not, not about location, or about offices or management. It's about paying the writers for the great thought-provoking content (when have you noticed a grammar or spelling error on Salon?) and bandwidth, in that order of cost.
Advertisers are comfortable with established print magazines. If Salon went to a dead-tree distro model, they'd be just another new publication competing for ad dollars and shelf space. The failure rate for new print magazines is pretty horendous.
Most of Salon's expensives come from actually paying well-respected and well-written authors.
Fair enough, but $75 million worth???
$75 million dollars is a gargantuan amount of money, enough to employ hundreds of people for years. They had ad revenue and 40,000 subscribers too. Incredible.
I donated $5 to SpaceDaily for magazine articles, and i've donated to several webcomics. People tend to get upset when you tell them that they have to pay X amount or you won't be able to view it, while they're much more open about giving you some non-exact amount of money after they've already looked at the media and decided they like it. Whether or not the larger number of smaller contributions can counter a smaller number of high cost subscriptions, i have no idea.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
They had good writing. As a modest literary magazine, along the lines of the Atlantic or the Nation, they had potential. But no way should they have ever become a major public company. That was sheer arrogance.
There was so much of that in the dot-com era.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Right wing media functions on the same principle as infomercials.
Their customers arent the viewers but the people pushing the message. They make their money by ensuring that certain types of messages are continously pushed at the people.
Truly left wing media does not have that choice. There isnt some one that will make a lot of money if truly left wing agenda is pushed. So there is no one to pay for it. Sure most people will benefit. But that is the problem large groups of people have the collective action problem and cant take up media empires. Rupert Murdoch can.
It is true that Rush dominates the radio waves, it is also true that less and less people are listening to radio. So Rush is not on every damn radio station because people really like him, but because powerful people want him there, and they want him saying the things he is saying.
That being said there is another issue - what people call left wing media (CNN ABC, etc) is not really left wing. And if you use that definition left wing media is not doing that bad - i am sure in the nytimes they laugh at the ny post, and even after recieving hundreds of millions of dollars from a cult leader the washington times is nothing compared to the washington post (considered to be liberal for some bizare reason).
Truly left wing media is really rare and is usually actively resisted by powerful people including "left wing" media. Thus Naom Chomsky although he sells a lot of books, and sells out every public appearence he does, will have a lot of trouble getting a column published in the "liberal" ny times.
hahaha
you mean the way he won two elections and then his vice president who lacks any charisma still won an election (well he won the election part anyway)?
I suppose most of my exposure to Salon is their smear campaign of the company I work for - Clear Channel.
What's funny to me is that they spend an inordinate amount of time criticizing companies like the one I work for that do what they have to in order to stay in business, yet they are apparently unable to stay in business themselves.
Apparently in addition to not understanding the principles that govern the radio or record businesses, they're a little fuzzy on basic business principles in general... most notably that you need to make more money than you spend.
How the hell do you spend $75 million on a WEB SITE? Does Slashdot cost that much to run?
If that's how much 'respectable' authors cost... they're overpriced. If paying what you're 'worth' puts people out of business, guess what: you're not actually worth that much. Works the same with DJ's, though CC gets slammed for firing overpriced talent, putting together and using a low cost solution, and keeping the shop open.
Also: to respond to a previous comment: The reason commercial radio is dominated by right wingers and the left wingers need government subsidy is because the left wingers can't run a business to save their lives. Apparently the same holds true for left wing websites.
I think there's a problem of terminology here. The lady isn't deserving of anything. If the country was a pond, she'd be the crud that lived on the bottom. But she's our crud and because of that we take pity on her.
We realize that it could be any one of us on the bottom of that pond, but we also need to realize that even the bottommost dreg can raise itself off the floor. The goal of welfare should be to encourage and enable those dregs to lift themselves off the floor with a minimum of assistance. Rawls expounds on this concept of the safety net, but IMO goes a little overboard advocating what amounts to be a neo-Communist state ala Finland or Sweden.
The welfare system is to be judged on how well it lifts people from the bottom and returns them to productivity. When people find themselves unable to escape from the jaws of the system, something is seriously wrong and probably lacking in the system. However, tossing the system wholesale is wrongheaded IMO. A revamping and rethinking of strategies to help welfare recipients rather than simply handing them a check would be far better than tossing the baby out with the bathwater and relying on private charities who are simply not equipped to help at this time.
I have been pwned because my
Wired was the first source AFAIK to describe the Well as "one of the earliest and most influential online communities."
So far the only influence of the Well is the self-agrandizing perspective of those who belonged to it.
Usenet ran circles around the Well, not to talk about the early Internet. Heck, Joe McCarthy mailing list at MIT was more influential than the Well.
So put a lid on it. The Well was a neat local BB in the Bay area. Nothing more, nothing less.
K5 and it's ilk have their niche, but there's no way that Plastic compares to what Suck used to be.