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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."
I guess the marketing model of making your ads get bigger and bigger and crowd your stories and then forcing users to switch to having to have a premium service to get acess to all the content just doesn't work.
Too bad. Too many have seen that as the way to go.
"Oh no, 3 horny women and only 2 condoms...Thank god I read slashdot"
It's no /. and even though it's generally slanted for the left-thinking crowd, I'll miss Salon if it goes belly up.
They've had some very insightful articles and interesting columnists (I really miss reading Camille Paglia). The handwriting was on the wall when they adopted the subscription model. Most people aren't willing or even able to pay for content.
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
I have spent many hours reading Salon. It's one of the sites I check every day. Even after they moved most of their content to the premium service there were enough interesting articles left in the free section to make it worth skimming. Unfortunately if they do go under, the only really interesting news/opinion webzine left will be Slate.
I wanted to support them, and thought about subscribing. But I've always had strong concerns about their financials, and was worried that after I forked over my 30 dollars that they'd go under. This is one of the reasons I'm reluctant to pony up money for any web site. There's no guarantee that even after I subscribe that the site will still be there for the length of my subscription. I know it's not much money, but still if I pay for a year, I want to know that the site will still be there at the end of that year.
Of course I don't know why anyone bought the stock. It was obvious that they had no real strategy for turning a profit. As a business Salon is a disaster. They put out the equivalent of a weekly magazine on a daily basis. It's a shame that quality content just isn't enough.
I'm not an actor, but I play one on tv.
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.
Not necesarily. If they were writing solely about pieces of hardware (e.g. Tom's Hardware) or had other people submit article to them (e.g. Slashdot), then yes, the company could be anywhere.
Salon, however, often writes about social trends and what's happening in society; they write about people. In order to do that coherently and effectively, the writers have to be where the people are. One cannot write a story about what people in the big city think while living in Eye Socket, Montana. Yes, land is cheap there, but only because nobody else wants it. For some businesses, living in an expensive city is a necessary expense.
I wonder when f*ckedcompany.com will appear on its' own site?....
Here the Link.
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While Eye Socket, Montana might be a little extreme, the fact of the matter is that their journalism could have been done in many places other than SF. I mean, do you think Ariana Huffington lives in San Francisco? If they want to find out about life in the big city, they pay some freelance writer in the big city to tell them about it.
I think they could have done qutie well journalistically had they lived in any of a number of other largish cities that weren't nearly so pricey.
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I've long suspected that the right (and moreso the far right) tend to gather en masse, in print, online, on radio and television, because it somehow helps them to substantiate their viewpoints.
Meanwhile most left leaning folks I know tend to consider their viewpoints conscience driven, and thus need no public stroking for justification or acceptance.
Just a theory.
--I disagree, and am actually annoyed with your urban-centrism. Here's a smack with a cluestick-guess what-most people don't live in san fran, nyc, washington dc or la. dig? I know you like to think so, but it's time to take the societal trainign wheels off, therer's a big ole country out there that is neither east armpit north dakota NOR the aforementioned cities which is filled up with "hooman beans"who are probably more valauble to the nation in actual productivity. Ya know, "real stuff".
The previous commenter was right-on. It's not only urban elitism, it's specific urban elitism as "culture" or "where the people are".
Want to see problems? They are concentrated (OK heavily outlined and mirrored) in this nation in those 4 cities. Are there some innovations come from there? Why yes, but the tradeoffs of immorality, greed, lying, exploitative 1337 behavior, etc, are a drag and am embarassment for the entire nation. that is the majority part of the "culture" you export, and guess what again, most people ain't buying.
You have good and bad in those cities, but I will tell you, most people outside those 4 specific areas see you as more of the problem then the solution.
And over priced rents and over paid salaries now dropping left and right are the tip of the iceberg with these clue stick clues.
We in the redzones are biding our time, ya'all blue zone folks had your turn, and guess what? "Food" is more important than video games, "wheat" is more important than starbucks, "water"is more important than WIFI, and WE control that stuff. Just keep inflicting what you applaud as your superior "culture' on us and wait to enjoy the backlash that's coming. Get off slashdot and read some other news. Do some non cyber traveling around the nation and NOT in an airplane. Your sterotyping collective mindsets of trailer parks and nascar is sorta out of date and needs a little updating and patches to be the current stable release.
Be willing to see the other person outside a 50 mile strip lining both costs is just as valuable as you urban/coastal/blue zone 1337's, or don't be surprised one day when you have no power or food or water and wonder what happened.
The other writer was correct, salon wants to save money, they could cut salaries to 1/3rd, and move their offices, still stay in business, but they are so caught up in living in "coolville" they'll go broke first.
This is taught to children as "cutting off your nose to spite your face"and is usually regarded as lame behavior. Or another - "throwing good money after bad".
To the rest of the country what they have been doing is that's "crazy". Salon execs deserve it if they can't see it. Being unprofitable comes from bad business planning, that's it, and spending more than you have. They did and do both. Mostly to be cool. Really, just so they can be cool and tell everyone just how cool they really are and please pay for us to keep telling you that.
This is not likely to "make money"and it obviously *doesn't*. They went broke from "cool", and I ask you, how "cool" is it to be broke? And quite frankly, their articles reflect these same biases, which the bulk of the country rejects, I've read them a few times-clueless professional students style writing. I honestly don't know any single one of my fellow news junkies (who cover the political spectrum) who consider them to be any site worth looking at, maybe that's another reason they are going under. Spend 15 minutes on salon you realise you are in a time warp, back to the 60's with computers-wheee!
Jokeski.
Ultra elite urban-centrist liberalism is a flawed political construct, it's artifical and only possible by theft from productive wealth creating people, usually at the point of socialist governments gun, same as the opposite extreme is.
Those political systems fail because in the endgame, people in general just think they suck because they don't work, so WRITING about that in that style won't work either once it's forced to be self supporting. They are being forced to move out of mommys basement and guess what? They found out they weren't worth the magna-money they thought they were in their delusional fog of reefer smoke and cappucino "productivity" attempts. Same as any number of other self delusional dot-bombs found out.
This really shouldn't be surprising, either.
Hint-most people aren't extremists. Salon is run by clueless extremists. Advertisers noticed clueless extremists really are stupid, and aren't really able to support themselves, ie, "parasitic", don't really want to do anything but be spoon fed at someone else's expense.
This won't work very long.
buh bye salon, now go forth and get real honest jobs for a few years.
Have a nice day
(For the record, I'm libertarian, and don't associate myself with either the left or right wing.)
Practically speaking, the liberal mentality fits the poor to lower-middle class income group, because (in the USA anyway) the left focuses on taking your money away from you forcibly, and giving it to "the needy," such as all those DESERVING people on welfare.
So of course the poorer people in the country are going to be left wing... they want my tax money.
The right wing tends to be the richer side of things, they work to allow me to keep my money, and donate it to those organizations I wish, as I see fit. (Except I have to trade in control over my body for this financial luxury.)
So, to me, it makes perfect sense that leftist media have a hard time surviving, while right wing media thrive. Just look at the audiences' incomes. I'm sure there are studies out there showing average incoming levels of the two sides.
"And like that
The crucial difference between Salon and k5 is this k5 readers are the "content providers," whereas Salon asks its readers to subsidise a staff of professional content providers. Salon's basic assumptions are, dare I say it, "old economy." It should not surprise anybody who has been around the net that most people are not willing to pay for content. People are, as the example of k5 shows, willing to pay for services and connectivity in the broadest sense of that word.
[Apparently some p0rn sites make money charging for content, however powerful social forces have been pressuring to make pornographic info less free than other kinds of info, and this opens the door to all kinds of pandering. In due time even the p0rn mongers will be forced to give up or greatly modify their pay-for-content model.]
Sites like kuro5hin.org which, through careful donation drives, make 6 months of operating money in 3 days. Non-profits who are there for the people, who are lean and run well mainly out of the pockets of the people who're there?
Maybe a big business media site like Salon can't stay in business, but I'm sure that a leaner site could've. The Internet is all about the little guy, as Dan's Data's "Minnows 1, whales 0" argues. Until more people are online supporting a services model, you can't just base your entire revenue on a needing "just a few more" subscribers to break even.
Salon should've restructured about 74.5 million ago. They've lost a stupid amount of money.
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