Slashdot Mirror
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.
how many subscribers there are to slashdot?
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
If they're getting paid per click, then generally advertisers don't pay for forced clicks, ie: I'm clicking this because I have to, not because I'm genuinely interested in their product. At least in the adult industry, this is a *big* no-no unless you accept a *much* smaller pay rate (generally called 'blind' clicks). I don't know how it'll fly with their advertisers.
Tasteful banner ads for online porn! Afterall, it's still the online money making king.
If Salon has decided to take this route, why not allow micropayments? I don't have a subscription to Salon, because I don't read it very often. But I do sometimes find 'premium' stories I'd like to read...Just not enough to get a subscription. If I could pay 25 cents or whatever to read the story, I gladly would.
I realize there are problems with accepting micropayments via credit card, but certainly something like PayPal could be used.
- James
It's an interesting idea, a "temporary subscription" in return for viewing some advertising. It seems there's something for everyone. The advertiser gets a forum where people actually have to click through the ad; Salon gets some money from the advertiser; and non-subscribers get access to "premium" content. If this works (and Salon stays in business in part because of this), perhaps other content sites will follow suit.
-Brendan
It's too bad to see Salon go -- they have genuinely interesting features on occassion. That said, I don't see how they ever really planned on surviving once the dot-com meltdown occurred. Selling the ability to opt-out of annoying ads just didn't cut it, especially given their level of overhead (big-name writers and the like). If Suck couldn't keep its head above water, Salon was always doomed. Still, it'll suck to have the only real webzine be Slate.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
BTW, Salon.com ranks No 714 on Alexa.com, which means that they serve more than 2-3 million pages per day. That should make them around $50,000 per month from ads. More than enough to pay a small team of journalists.
Now they have a solid base of advertisers and 45,000 paying subscribers, which is really good for an online magazine. The WSJ article says they are looking at a strategy of reducing costs. Sounds like a plan to me. Is it really conceivable that they can't find a way to keep costs within expected revenues?
- 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.
what you're missing is that it takes money to run a magazine... *real* journalists, *real* reporters, etc.
it took USA Today 5 YEARS to become profitable, and it was still only because they were bought out by a huge megamedia company.
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.
According to the article, they've lost about $79.7 million from their start in 1995.
During which time VA Software lost $725 million.
Man, that sounds scary. Like something from Brazil or Blade Runner. Might make your head explode if you watch for thirty seconds or more. I guess that's why Salon limited it to 10 seconds. Too much liability.
I think there are many reasons Salon is failing: too much overhead, lack of a print version, content too stagnant for the medium(NET). But the real nail in the coffin is their far-left reporting/editorial. The Fray is great, but if you are going to post a bunch of baseless rhetoric to get readers fired up you had better have a convenient method for opposing views to reply. Otherwise you wind up with former readers like me, who don't like to be beaten-up with our arms tied behind our backs. Disagreeing with many of the articles drove me to read the site, but in the end it also drove me away. Slate is a similar site, but the forum is much more accessible and tied to the content and the authors/guest writers and columnists seem to actually read the forum posts.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
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.
I'd like to state that I worked for a company that had over 180,000 "subscribers" before it folded in 2001. We didn't charge for a subscription, but we did charge for content. Each piece of content you viewed was a small fee. Quite frankly, I was never convinced of this business worthiness of this approach. We burnt through about 30 million before going belly up. Looks like Salon will be doing the same thing.
I think online communities are going to have a hard time selling to individuals. While the metaphore works for real world newspapers and magazines, their publishing numbers are going down. Less people are reading them because they can get free content on the web. Now, I totally believe you should pay for content, but it should be subscription based and not be on a per site basis. In a sense, it should work like AOL (I know, I know). With AOL, you get prepackaged content. I'm suggesting you pay xx.xx dollars and get a pass to 20 or 30 web sites that all use the same password. You should be able to sign up for these sites through different subscribers, like you would your domain registration or cable access. The web sites still get the same amount of money, but if one 'net-network can provide a lower price but sell to more people, they can compete. They could also provide different site packages or offer more sites.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
You ran for 5 or 6 years by giving away 100% of your content and lost an assload of money :( . Then you started only giving away 80% and lost less money :) . But you have still lost 80 million dollars :(
:( . And maybe you'll actually turn your business around, if that is still even a remote possibility :()
Right now, you should immediately switch and give away only 20% or less of your content and charge for the rest. Maybe you will still go out of business, but if you don't do this you are guaranteed to, running crazy ad deals for mercedes is not even close to a long term solution
sig:
See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
Who really thought that giving ... facials over the internet was a good idea?
I don't know about the rest of you, but I would think any company that could figure out how to give facials over the Internet would make a ton of money. I'd like to see a copy of THAT business plan !
Anyone remember those old warez sites, (and some H/P/A sites as well) where they tried to force you to click their sponsors, or links to top-sites in order to access them?
I guess all kinds of marketing comes around. But the real question is, are people too cheap to pay for salon premium really going to buy Mercedes-Benzs?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
600K a year would not come close to covering the cost of the high-profile and high-quality writers and editors they have on board. Then don't forget their production staff, sales staff, marketing staff, tech people, legal counsel, bandwidth costs, associated overhead, etc., etc.,
... as far as these things go. Considering that their losses are down to under $6 million/ year (per their last quarterly SEC filing), and that their income is up $0.5 million from a year ago while they've cut non-content-related (i.e. marketing and administrative) expenses by the same about, they could be viable in a few more years.
It would take less than 200,000 new subscribers at the $30 rate for them to break even, less than 7% of the 2.7 million unique visitors they cite for December 2000.
The main problem, of course, is time.
Salon has been around since the beginning of the internet boom & have a loyal reader base. Unfortuntely, most of their readers are used to getting their info for free & at this point it's going to be an uphill battle to convince folks to cough up for what they've been using all along. Will they be able to do so before they have to declare bankruptcy? Let's hope not.
Damn, post a story about how Salon is losing money and then link them in the story? That's like telling your doctor that you have a headache and then they kick you in the nuts.
Wake, work, pick up the kids, watch Friends, chat on AOL, sleep - repeat. Not much time left in that equation to develop a curiousity about politics (or the world in general, outside of your hometown and what you see on CNN).
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 subscribed to Yahoo internet life last year -- dead after 3 issues
I subscribed to Salon last month (admittedly I knew they've been in hot water more or less the last few years) and now this
I oughtta start charging these companies for my not subscribing to them...
Kuro5hin.org and SlashDot are successful if you look in terms of small-business successful. But not compared to Time and People magazine. Drudgereport is another example of a "success". It seems the key to success in this new medium is to keep overhead to a minimum and provide content that isn't availabile elsewhere.
In other words, targeting specific consumers. Salon is out there covering much of the same material with the same slant as the mainstream media. Sure they do some innovative stuff and take a little more risk, but really not that often.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Everybody have a look at http://www.mercedesproblems.com/ before you even think of buying one of these clunkers.
I'm giving Volvo a try now.
Personally I think the web is going to kill the news media as we know it today i think this is a good thing. We complain as a society when special interest groups taint our polititians, but we never flinch when they taint our news outlets.
What it will boil down to is journalists will have to actually do something other than play on peoples emotions because the truth i.e. facts will be readily available on the net. The net will allow small time journaliistic talents to be heard on a large scale. As it is today the chances of becoming a notable and famous journalist is smaller than becoming the next Eminem.
I'm personally sick of seeing Ashleigh Banfield on CNN dressed up like an Arab reporting on issues she 1) has no real clue about and 2) probably couldn't give a shit about anyway.
Hasn't anyone been watching CNN? They report the same 2-3 stories all day, everyday. When they have been beaten to death they report them 500 more times until they are sure everyone in America has been brainwashed by it. Then they find 2-3 more stories that are exactly the same but have different faces.
The liberal media is just out of this world these days. Nothing but crying and complaining and pointing fingers at everything and everyone.
The answer is independant media run by people who do it in their spare time. Much like open source software where multiple influences and ideas are used. Right now you have nothing like that in the media, most of the news agencies are run by large corporations (MSNBC anyone?), or are influenced heavily by liberal democrats who care little about real issues.
It's time we took the media into our own hands. There is no reason you can't report what is happening locally on your own webpage. Isn't this largely what slashdot is? It's news contributed by multiple sources for the benefit of it's own contributors. You get back what you put in.
I'll end my rant there.
Quick and dirty definitions:
APIC = cumulative money the company received for issuing stock
Accumulated deficit = cumulative net losses of the company since inception (companies that have made money call this "retained earnings")
Operating expenses:
Production, content and product: $9.8M(2001) $10.1M(2000)
Sales and marketing: $7.1M(2001) $15.5M(2000)
For those counting, that's over $42 MILLION in operating expenses JUST between production, sales, and marketing in JUST the past two fiscal years. Looks like to me someone's spending too much on advertising and IT support... (or they have the most overpaid writers in the world)
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.)
The sales figures are slightly disappointing actually. Ideally you would like to see sales and marketing costs increasing year over year since a majority of those costs probably stem from paid commissions. The implication is that they lost more than half of their sales revenues last year.
LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
Yeah, because indymedia.org, thenation.com, www.theregister.co.uk, www.politechbot.com, www.alternet.org are all just non-entities. Not to mention high-quality foreign journalism like the Guardian or the BBC.
I do not have a signature
Ummm.. Have you ever actually read any of the articles in salon, or are you just going by what you've read at NewsMax?
Are you seriously suggesting that Rush, Ollie North, and the other right wing guys have anything to offer other than attacking? During Clinton's presidency, all they did was attack, all the time screaming about Clinton's sex life? I've haven't read much in Salon that can truly be classified as an 'attack'. Criticism is different than an attack. Read Arianna Huffington's column, you'll get alternatives, not just attacks...
The system has failed you, don't fail yourself. --Billy Bragg
Everybody is asking, "How could an online magazine lose so much money" and everybody else is giving vague answers. According to their financial reports they seem to have trimmed down considerably this year, but looking at last year they were spending about a million a month on content and production, half a million on sales and marketing, $100k on research and development (??? you tell me) and about $400k on admin. That's $24 million a year right there. Losing $11 million/year doesn't seem so far-fetched.
What interests me is that each of the two top execs made $300k last year. Not bad pay for shovelling venture capital down a hole, eh?
...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.
When will it occur to Mercedes that anyone trying to save $12 a year in subscription costs probably isn't going out to buy a Mercedes?
The only way for us to become aware of such abuses is to have a strong alternative to the mainstream media. So I would urge all slashdotters, even those who are usually apathetic to political issues, to invest some time and energy in political awareness and support for independent journalism. Otherwise, someday you may find yourself at the wrong end of a law enforcement process gone out of control.
mhack
Building a better ribosome since 1997
It seems to me that many of these responses to Salon's troubles miss the point, focusing almost exclusively on the magazine's perceived business failings. Whether or not they, or the .com downturn, or the nation's dwindling supply of patience for in-depth and serious-minded news coverage, are to blame for the magazine's dire straits, the fact remains that Salon maintains a standard of journalistic quality and integrity that will be sorely missed if they should go out of business.
As many of my worthy peers have pointed it, Salon does lean a little left, no doubt about it. But given our country's recent and violent list to starboard, and our Democratic leaders' apparent unwillingness or inability to act like a real opposition party, we need magazines like this more than ever.
Uh huh. And the code looks like this.
/* 1% chance of payment */
//if (Math.random() < 0.01) {
// return true;
//}
//return false;
// Fixed a bug (Bob - Marketing Department)
/** Decide if payment is required.
* @author Jim - IT Development
*/
public boolean isPayment {
return true;
}
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
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
which is why the word "Nazi" is a german acronymn for the "National Socialist Workers Party"
The "National Socialist" name was propagandistic, dumbass. The Nazis needed all the political leverage they could get in the twenties. Hitler figured people would be dumb enough to fall for this, and he was right. In fact people still fall for it even today.
It's like the "Recording Industry Artists of America". Don't believe everything you read.
I've never been a subscriber to Salon, and I wouldn't say their content is all great, but one of the things that worries me most these days is the airtight corporate control over all our major (and minor for the most part) media. Salon at least does some independent investigative journalism and is not afraid to print stories from one of my favorite journalists, Greg Palast, including his exposé of the Florida election theft in 2000, and his "re-exposé" of the same thing still going on in this year's election there. Also, Joe Conason's Journal is a regular Salon political column that is almost always great. I can get stuff like this elsewhere, but, sadly not often from a place as "reputable" as Salon. If Salon disappears the pickings will be even slimmer and the Palasts and Conasons of the world will be even more marginalized.
Investigative reporting costs tons of money, and even if Salon has the best of intentions, the bottom line will prevent them from doing lots of stories. Maybe we can use the slashdot effect to really make a difference, and not only save them, but give them the funds to actually improve. Our corporate government and out-of-control military-industrial complex need to keep the people blissfully ignorant in order to continue getting away with murder every day. Ownership of the media is their biggest weapon in this war against us, and so I've decided I can afford to pay $18.50 (or $30 with no ads) to try and save a dying breed. Who's with me?