Salon status
It occurred to me just now to wonder how Salon's doing these days. I looked at some of their recent press releases, and found that they're still losing upwards of a million dollars a quarter. Which is a substantial improvement over the $4.5M/quarter losses they were posting two years ago and the $5.5M/quarter loss they posted a year ago, but still seems like a lot of money to me. They've got about 44,000 paid subscribers; that doesn't seem like a lot (at $30/year for a subscription, that means $1.3M/year revenue from subscriptions, which is only about 15% of their annual costs at this point), but it's up from, apparently, about 24K subscribers six months ago; if they can nearly double their paid-subscriber base every six months, that's pretty impressive. They claim 3.6 million readers per month (though we all know it's impossible to determine number of readers; I think they're actually talking about unique IP addresses, which most sites seem to assume translate directly to unique readers), so less than 2% of their readers are paying for the premium content so far; sounds plausible that they could increase that number over time.
It'll be very interesting to me to see which of the remaining online businesses survive the next few years and become profitable. Salon is certainly a grand experiment; I rather hope they succeed in the long run, even though I'm not currently interested enough in their content to subscribe myself. (And before anyone takes me to task for that, I'll note that I do pay for online content from various other publishers; I buy stuff from Fictionwise, for example, and I subscribe to Tangent Online.)