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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".
If you look at the three things that anyone or anything can do if it is threatened, it can Move, Adapt, or Die. Salon is based in San Franscisco, California. WHAT'S WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?!? That's one of the highest rent places in North America! There's cheaper rent within 100 miles of where they're currently based! Obviously no one considered the "move" possibility.
As for business models changing, advertising methods changing, they don't sound like they've adapted too well either. If you've been past due since December, you should have seen the writing on the wall in at least October or November. Some companies don't even have central offices anymore, they are all working from home or have one small office, and they use their colocation site for their main office servers. That would be a way to not be screwed. They haven't exactly adapted fully, either.
What's this leave us with? Die. Salon will probably die. I'd be inclined to think of them as simply the latest fallen dotcom, that took a little longer to fold than the others. I don't begrudge them for their efforts, but things were not right in order for Salon to get this far in the hole in the first place.
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
Move!
They are web-based.
Sigs are dangerous coy things