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

Re:Charging for content sealed Salon's fate

[agentZ]

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.

Why not report the positive?

[Inoshiro]

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.