Blogging has been scant because we've been working feverishly on our new setup for Salon, which is now live. (David's letter announcing this is here.)
The idea here is an extension of our Salon Premium plan, with a twist. We're offering two ways to access our original content. You can pay to subscribe. Or you can look at an ad and then get a "day pass" to the site.
We already have close to 50,000 current subscribers (with close to 60,000 who have ever signed up). That's not enough on its own to get us to the break-even point -- but it's far more successful than the choir of Salon naysayers would ever have given us credit for. We never wanted to move to an "all-subscription" site without providing some means for people to read our articles who couldn't afford to -- and for newcomers to sample what we do here.
I know that there are people who still feel that Web content should be free. Certainly the Web is built on linking, and linking isn't easy when sites throw up subscription gates. That's why we offer a precis of every subscription-only story on the site; it's not full-content but it's more than just a headline.
The truth is that free, professional journalistic content, content created by people who get paid for it, only makes sense if you're selling something else -- subscriptions to a print magazine, say. For Salon, or any other standalone independent that needs to pay not only for content but for bandwidth and software and health plans for employees and so forth, some variation on the subscription plan is the only way to go. We've tried to make ours open and flexible -- to keep our gates passable even as we try to support our business.
We're fortunate enough that such a large group of Web readers think what we do is worth paying for. And we'll keep working like crazy to make as many of our subscribers as we can feel like they've gotten more than their money's worth.
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