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

Here we go again!

[peterdaly]

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

What department?

[TheFrood]

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

Re:75 Million

[NickV]

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.

Re:Left-wing media a financial failure?

[ObviousGuy]

First off, congrats on being the first person in the history of this website to use the term 'looser' correctly. Could this mark a turning point in Slashdot's history?

Second, I think the fact that people gravitate towards the right wing and Republican media is that the typical liberal simply doesn't understand how to talk to 'the common man'. Telling the average person that they are bad for believing certain things, bad for saying certain things, bad for belonging to the wrong race, bad for being of the wrong gender, bad for simply existing and using up precious global resources while others are starving across the globe, and bad for having values that may result in the automatic judging of others doesn't endear anyone to the leftist cause.

The Republican/Right Wing press is much more liberal in the Millian sense. (One must not look to the far Right Wing where the Neo Nazis reside, just as one must not look to the far Left Wing where Communists make their home, because these are simply aberrations of the mainstream Left and Right wings.) The Right Wing's ideology as espoused by the Right Wing media is that every man is an island and his place in society should be decided upon his skills and his contributions to society. No one is owed anything beyond the rights bestowed at birth and attempts to provide one with something necessarily entails taking something from another.

This egalitarianism is exactly the kind of thing that most Americans believe in the core of their being. They look at racial preferences as being completely contrary to the concept of racial equality. They look at abortion as the murder of an innocent human being. They look upon lenient judges as shirkers of responsibility. And they look at those who would take from them to give to others as thieves.

The right wing plays to these people and the message resonates, not because the right wing is crafty in forming their message but because the people who believe this ARE the right wing.

Salon has been dead for a while

[Animats]

After all, they were kicked down from the NASDAQ National Market System to the Small-Cap Market in October of 2001. Their stock has dropped from $10 to $0.09. They've never made money. I had them on Deathwatch years ago. One of their editors used to bitch at me for listing them as doomed.

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.

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.

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.