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Salon Asks for Help
Henry V .009 writes "Salon.com is appealing to the community for help. They haven't been able to pay the rent since December. To date, they've lost about $80 million dollars. A cause of rejoicing for some. But their many readers are understandably sorry to see them in such desperate straits. Personally I hope they stick around, I think they are one of the best sources of independant journalism on the web--even if I happen to agree with less than 10% of what they have to say. I also think that it would be a shame for them to close now that they've finally created an advertising scheme that has a snowball's chance in hell of working on the web. I can actually recall some of the adverts I've seen on Salon--what other web site can you say that about? Salon says that if they get another 50,000 subscriptions (they currently have 50,000) they'll break even for the year." In the old role-playing game "Paranoia", there was a nice quote about what would happen when the player characters (who had never been outside of their enclosed city complex) made an attempt to swim in water over their heads: "delaying drowning".
I can actually recall some of the adverts I've seen on Salon--what other web site can you say that about?
How about adds for MS Visual Studio on Slashdot? Especially on articles that say that MS bites the big one.
Wow. Between the starving gold rock stars making a measlly 40K a year -- and a web site that pisses through 80 Million and can't find a way to keep the lights on, my heart just goes out to all these "poor" folks.
Maybe if I have any "compassion" left I will send a nickel to the evening news and a dime to the local newspaper -- they must be losing money to.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
[Salon] took out a 10-year lease on pricey but prestigious offices in downtown San Francisco. It seemed not to matter then that to be at the epicentre of the Internet revolution meant paying some of the most expensive rents in North America.
With seven years left on the lease, Salon is struggling to get out of the deal. It already missed a $200,000 payment to its landlord in December. (The company is also trying to get out of a less pricey lease on office space it maintains in New York.)
Yeah... that'll get you. Plus, they still have to pay people to create all that content in the first place... and those people need bean-bag chairs and little scooters. It's a vicious cycle.
Yep, you shouldn't call conservatives stupid. It's incredibly rude to bring attention to their stupidity.
Hi,
I'm David Talbot, editor of Salon. You're just the type of free-thinking writer we want! How's $200K to start?
ich muß mehr Kuhglocke haben
Just look at enron.com.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I got a creepy little jolt of surprise reading that. It's like you were watching me. :-)
It's true, though the comparison is way too strained. I've been to Salon's offices, and even at the height of the 'net boom, they were silly exhorbitant. Even for San Francisco they were over the top. Not to mention all the cash they spent developing their own CMS (yeah, they really did). I would like to see Salon survive, but every time I try to scrape up a little sympathy, I think of those offices, and I just can't.
I wish them the best, and hope they get out of their lease and learn a little thrift. I know they're already practicing a lot of thrift when it comes to paying their writers (they mostly don't). But some lessons are just learned too late.
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
Yeah, Camille Paglia did it right by beginning with utter self-parody at the outset.