Salon.com is an Internet-based media company founded in 1995 by editor-in-chief David Talbot and several other colleagues from the San Francisco Examiner. Though providing several services, it is best known for its online magazine, with content updated each weekday. Its headquarters are located in downtown San Francisco, California.
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Salon's magazine covers a variety of topics. American politics is a major focus, but by no means the only one. It has extensive reviews and articles about music, books, and films. It also has articles about "modern life" in all its forms, including relationships and sex. It covers technology, with a particular focus on the free software/open source movement.
Salon covers all of these issues from an unabashedly liberal political viewpoint, although the site has also featured regular columns from such conservatives as David Horowitz and Andrew Sullivan.
Its contributors include political cartoonists such as Tom Tomorrow who writes This Modern World.
Its online subscription-only discussion boards, Table Talk and The WELL, are quite popular.
History
As one of the earliest and most prominent web-only media outlets, Salon.com's history is reflective of the difficulties in creating a profitable business selling original, professionally-produced media content over the Internet. On June 22, 1999, Salon.com IPO'd on the NASDAQ stock exchange. Though dot-com speculation had not yet reached its peak by then, the performance of Salon.com's stock offering was mediocre, reflecting investor skepticism about its business model and the dutch auction IPO model it used to go public.
Such skepticism would soon be confirmed as Salon.com announced ever-increasing total losses. On November 13, 2002, the company announced it had accumulated cash and non-cash losses of $80 million. By February 2003 it was having difficulty paying its rent, and made an appeal for donations to keep the company running. On April 25, 2003 it launched Salon Premium, one of the first online content subscriptions. The success of Salon Premium defied the critics and staved off discontinuation of services, as Salon.com is still operating as of August 2005.
Salon.com is still in a precarious financial position, despite having signed over 130,000 subscribers since the inception of Salon Premium. Its stock has been delisted from the NASDAQ exchange and currently trades as an over-the-counter penny stock for less than fifty cents a share.
Below is an overview of Salon.com's business model and operations, ordered by advancing date:
- Free, around 15 new articles posted per-day, revenues wholly derived from in-page advertisements
- Per-day new content reduced
- Salon Premium subscription service launched. Approximately 20% of new content made available to subscribers only. Other subscription benefits included free magazines and ad-free viewing. Larger, more conspicuous ad units introduced for non-subscribers.
- Hybrid subscription model rolled in. Readers can access content by viewing a 15-second full screen advertisement to earn a "day pass" or gain access by subscribing to Salon Premium.
On October 9, 2003, Michael O'Donnell, the chief executive and president of Salon Media Group, said he was leaving the company after seven years because it was "time for a change." When he left, Salon.com had accrued $83.6 million in losses since its inception, and its stock traded for 5 cents on the over-the-counter bulletin board. David Talbot, Salon's chairman and editor-in-chief at the time became the new chief executive. Elizabeth "Betsy" Hambrecht, Salon's CFO, became the president.
As of early spring 2005, Salon.com had made a quarterly profit for the first time in its existence, benefiting from a resurgent online ad market and an established subscription business.
For some time, there was a security hole in Salon's paid-advertising model, in which any user could automatically obtain a "Day Pass" by accessing the URL http://www.salon.com/news/cookie.html. This hole was closed in early July 2005.
Books published
- Moses, Kate (editor). Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood (2000). ISBN 0671774689
- Miller, Laura (editor). The Salon.Com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors (2000). ISBN 014028088X