Salon, Nearly No Money and Ultramercials

Adam9 writes "As Salon fights for survival, they have introduced a new advertising program that allows you to receive a free 12 hour pass by clicking through about 10 seconds of advertisements. Currently, the advertisements are from Mercedes-Benz. According to the article, they've lost about $79.7 million from their start in 1995. They also have about 45,000 subscribers right now." Jamie also pointed out this article from the WSJ, as well as the words from Salon themselves about it.

Comments

Why I cancelled my subscription

[Chairboy]

I was a paying member of Salon for a year. The main way I read Salon was through my PDA using Avantgo. Salon's method for prompting users to get premium subscriptions was by giving a 1 page teaser of a premium article, then saying they should become paying members to read the rest.

Their avantgo channel, however, had no method in place for Premium subscribers to get full stories on their PDAs! For a year, the premium stories would have their little teaser, then at the bottom there would be a little apology to the effect of 'Sorry, we haven't made a channel for our premium subscribers yet, but we will soon!'

Empty promises.

They never made the channel, and since my primary interface to Salon was via PDA, I wasn't getting what I had paid for (premium access).

Their business decision to indefinately postpone the premium channels have probably cost them quite a handful of customers, which is unfortunate.

Kind of like Slashdot

[anthony_dipierro]

According to the article, they've lost about $79.7 million from their start in 1995.

During which time VA Software lost $725 million.

I tried it two weeks ago

[mao che minh]

I used this little feature about two weeks ago. I wanted to read the rest of one their "premium" articles that I really wanted to see the conclusion of. I just happened to actually read one of the ad's that claimed that I could get a free pass to read this article if only I would look at this $60,000 BMW or something. I agreed. After about 10 seconds an ad with about 10 frames generated. By the time I got to the third or fourth frame, I noticed that I didn't have to click through all of the images. In the lower corner, in very fine print, was a "skip to article" button or something. It worked.

Re:How did they lose $80 million?

[indiigo]

http://www.salon.com/ir/data/

Amazing what about 10 seconds of searching, a "financial" link, and a browser, will provide you.

Re:In other news...

[xmedar]

How about -

Indymedia

BBC

or for some partial journalism / general questioning and sometimes odd, but certainaly not bland corp media

Michael Moore

DisInfo

then there are specialist sites for different topics -

Cryptome

Statewatch