Salon watch
Going through some old journal entries, I found an entry from about a year ago about Salon's financial status, which led me to look at their recent press releases to see how they're doing now.
They're still losing over a million dollars per quarter, though their net loss for this past year was 30% less than their net loss from the preceding year. So I suppose they're gradually headed toward profitability—but at their current rate, it'll still be years before they stop losing money.
I once read somewhere that a new print magazine is expected to take about ten years to reach profitability. Salon was launched in 1996; maybe this means that if they can hold on for another three years, they just might make it.
They've currently got 62,000 paying Salon Premium subscribers; that's a 71% subscription-renewal rate from the previous year's 44,000 subscribers, plus 31,000 new subscribers in the past year. I have no idea how that renewal rate compares to print magazines, but overall they have 42% more subscribers than they had a year ago, which sounds pretty darn respectable to me. I admit that I was awfully dubious about their chances of survival when they switched to the subscription model; I'm pleased to have been wrong about readers' willingness to pay for web content.
Oh, and entirely unrelatedly, Cory Doctorow has a new story at Salon: "Truncat." Set in the world of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.
