{"id":69,"date":"2001-10-02T12:52:41","date_gmt":"2001-10-02T19:52:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2001\/10\/02\/69.html"},"modified":"2001-10-02T12:52:41","modified_gmt":"2001-10-02T19:52:41","slug":"imminent-death-of-the-web-film","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2001\/10\/02\/imminent-death-of-the-web-film\/","title":{"rendered":"Imminent death of the Web (film at 11)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The New York Times reports<\/a> that Salon<\/a><\/cite> is switching to a subscriber-only model. (At least, I think that's what it's saying. It actually says that Salon<\/cite> will be charging for \"its news and political coverage\"—I'm not sure if that means everything they post, or just some stuff.)<\/p>\n

This brings up some big questions:<\/p>\n

Is this the beginning of the end for Salon<\/cite>?<\/p>\n

Or does it herald a new age in which Web content companies can actually make money by selling subscriptions?<\/p>\n

Note that Salon<\/cite>'s Premium service, whereby they made some of their content subscriber-only, has picked up 15,500 paid subscribers since April. That sounds pretty impressive to me.<\/p>\n

Of course, there's also the question of whether Salon<\/cite> is sui generis. Even if they can make this work (and I remain skeptical, but I wish them luck), can anyone else do it? Especially in today's economic climate?<\/p>\n

I suppose it's also worth noting that, as I understand it, most print magazines can't cover costs just by subscriptions; the subscriptions are mostly a way to boost their advertising rates. So it'll be interesting to see whether, in the face of constantly falling advertising revenue online, Salon<\/cite> will be able to bring in enough money from subscriptions alone to cover costs. They appear to have spent $30 million last year; to bring in that much from $30\/year subscriptions, they need to have a million subscribers. They claim 3.4 million unique readers, but I doubt that a third of those will be willing to pay $30\/year for a subscription.<\/p>\n

URLs:<\/p>\n

Slate<\/cite> publisher on selling content (May '01)<\/a><\/p>\n

Detailed (but maybe biased) analysis of Salon<\/cite>'s SEC filings (Apr. '01)<\/a><\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New York Times reports that Salon is switching to a subscriber-only model. (At least, I think that’s what it’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-69","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69","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=69"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}