{"id":3078,"date":"2005-08-25T10:13:15","date_gmt":"2005-08-25T17:13:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2005\/08\/25\/3078.html"},"modified":"2005-08-25T10:13:15","modified_gmt":"2005-08-25T17:13:15","slug":"quasiannual-salon-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2005\/08\/25\/quasiannual-salon-update\/","title":{"rendered":"Quasi-annual Salon update"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I have a certain vested interest in the question of whether an online publication (other than the Wall Street Journal<\/cite>'s online edition) can turn a profit, so I've been watching Salon<\/cite>'s financial results intermittently for a while.<\/p>\n

Back in October of 2001, I discussed their then-new subscription model<\/a>. In March 2002, I noted that they had 30,000 paid subscribers<\/a>, and that they would consider the subscription model a success if\/when they reached 100,000 paid subscribers.<\/p>\n

In August 2002, I found out that they had 44,000 paid subscribers<\/a>, and were losing about a million dollars a quarter.<\/p>\n

In August 2003, I noted that they had reached 62,000 paid subscribers<\/a>, but were still losing about a million dollars a quarter. I also noted that I had once read that a new print magazine is expected to take about ten years to reach profitability, and suggested that Salon<\/cite> might be on track to be profitable by their tenth anniversary in 2006.<\/p>\n

I wasn't paying attention last August, so I didn't post about it. But a couple days ago I found out that Salon<\/cite> is selling The Well<\/a> (an online forum system\/community that Salon<\/cite> bought in 1999). That article mentions in passing that Salon<\/cite> now has 15,300 paid subscribers, down from 20,900 a year ago. Yikes.<\/p>\n

Except, stop the presses: that article appears to be in direct contradiction to Salon<\/cite>'s press release<\/a> from February 2005, about the quarter ending in December 2004, which says that they had 89,100 Salon Premium subscribers, \"compared to approximately 73,700 a year ago.\" I have no idea how to reconcile those two statements. In reaction to the article I cited in my previous paragraph, I initially wrote a kind of downbeat couple of paragraphs about how it's too bad the subscription model isn't working for them; but if I'm understanding their press release, it's working extremely well, so I've deleted those paragraphs.<\/p>\n

The article also says that their quarterly loss is down to $100,000, down from $1.2 million a year ago, but another Salon<\/cite> press release says they reported their first-ever \"pro forma net profit\" in November 2004, even though by GAAP standards they had a net loss of $1.2 million. So I suppose it could be argued that they're profitable already, depending on which standards you go by.<\/p>\n

So I'm suddenly reversing my downbeat ending. It looks to me like Salon<\/cite> is finally doing well, and could even reach their 100,000-subscriber target relatively soon. Cool beans!<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have a certain vested interest in the question of whether an online publication (other than the Wall Street Journal’s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3078\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}