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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.
- Start up
- Get lots of subscribers
- Sell out or IPO
Like in poker, they held a bad hand too long, and now they're dead. Big deal.Salon must be incredibly expensive to run. They employ full time journos and lots of support staff and techies. If a place like Kuro5hin.org (literally a one man show) barely hangs on through fundraisers and pledge drives then Salon with their scores of employees and meager advertising income are going down the tubes quickly.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
But the real nail in the coffin is their far-left reporting/editorial.
Because god knows there aren't any outlets for conservatives anywhere else in the media.
I'm kidding, I do agree Salon is liberal-oriented but have no problem with it given my politics. I'm pretty moderate and don't read Mother Jones or the National Review. Most magazines on/offline are politically oriented one way or another, most to far greater extremes. Perhaps out of concern for "balance" Salon has recently brought on Andrew Sullivan. I wish they'd found a better writer, but oh well.
/. is not immune.
The remarkable thing about Salon is that it has actually broken a number of stories over the last half-dozen years. There are frequent examples of excellent writing (not all of it). Many people of influence keep track of what the journal is saying. That's quite an accomplishment, and a good deal more expensive to achieve than your average on-line reader-driven news clipping service (ahem).
I would not encourage them to try to be all things to all people, if such a thing were possible. Certainly there could be editorial improvements, but nothing would turn Salon into a fount of wealth. The fundamental problem is the as-yet unestablished business model for this kind of thing. Others are watching Salon cast about for the answer -- the magazine is even polling its readers' opinions -- to learn from their success or failure.
I finally did subscribe to Salon relatively recently -- I *hope* they don't go bankrupt! If they do, it will foretell decreased access to the online versions of traditional press, the failure of other online forums, and pressure on the rest to somehow raise profitability by increasing annoying advertising or other schemes. Despite it's far lower overhead,
Ask not for whom the bell tolls....
It has been noted that Salon's financial woes (how the hell did they rack up 80M in debt?) stems from them hiring good writers. Excellent writers, in fact, top-of-the-line. Noam Chomsky comes to mind. But I have to point out that Alternet.org has writing that is, IMO, and just a smidge to the left of Salon.
So I have to ask, was the 80M in debt really necessary? Personally, I like Salon, and it is one of only three news sites in my bookmarks (along with the BBC and the aforementioned Alternet.org), and I am a subscriber to their premium service. But the idea that writers won't write unless they're paid is a lot like the RIAA saying people won't make songs if they can't !@#$ you in the butt for $16.99/cd. Just doesn't make any sense. But it sure seems to make sense to Salon:
"The greatest weakness of Internet users -- all of us -- is our failure to recognize the value of intellectual property. Of course we love free access to information -- the more the better. For years, those of us who are information junkies have been like pigs in mud. It has been fun, but those something-for- nothing days are over. There is a difference between the Internet mantra that "information loves to be free" and free information."
There is a large talent pool in the world, Salon. Use it. Big names are nice but big names are why you won't exist in a few years. The notion that talented writers only write if you lob a lot of money at them is just as false for the written word as it is for music.
My
Limekiller
I just went to salon and read a premium article. Here is my synopsis...
If a 10 second ad can keep salon and their reporters working I'm all for it. The US needs independent journalists. (Even if they sometimes say things you'd rather not hear. Personally I'm offended by something in Salon every single day. If I wasn't, I wouldn't bother to read it.)
Far left? *Far*?
Good God, has the spectrum in the US moved that far to the right?
Salon may be left/center, but I don't recall seeing any articles demanding redistribution of land in the US or violently returning the means of production to the proletariat. Far left is Revolution, my friend, where you don't publish people like David Horowitz, you string them up in the city square.
Far left? Jesus F Christ...
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
...not its dopey pro-rich-liberal bias or its coastline cliquishnes or its porn-driven, moronically desperate marketing schemes.
And they've gotten more average as they've asked for more money. You can turn on any cable news channel and see Andrew Sullivan and Arianna Huffington saying the same stupid things they say in their Salon columns. Greil Marcus writes for every magazine on earth. Tom Tomorrow and Lynda Barry are more widely syndicated than Seinfeld. Damien Cave's tech columns are no better than your average +4 Interesting
They've fired their best writers (Paglia, for example) to cut costs, and hired utterly average dead-tree columnists (why King Kaufman and Allen Barra instead of, say, Ralph Wiley?--what is this, 1982?), and just flat-out failed to bring in interesting new people who could liven things up (Jim Goad, Nick Gillespie and Justin Raimondo could probably use a few extra bucks from side jobs, for example).
Browse their archives from three to five years ago. The articles were mostly good. They were almost all interesting. Some were even surprising. But they waited until the site degenerated into PBS blandness (plus occasional class-baiting "I Was a Stripper for a Day" and "Trailer-Park Republicans: Whitey in the Wild" bilge and "classy" porn for prissy feminists and self-hating men) to start asking for money.
That--and simple mismanagement--is why they're broke. And they deserve it. "Lilies that fester..."
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.