Salon May Not Survive Beyond February 
I've been reading Salon for about two years now. And yes I will admit that it's mostly their excellent Sex section that I spend the most time browsing, but really the entire site is the perfect example of what a smart timely online news and lifestyle magazine should be. And I always appreciated the fact that for the most part it was free to readers with an option to subscribe for further site access.
But all of that is changing now with their financial difficulties and I find myself torn as to how I should react.
Their new business model of either subscribe or click through Flash commercials to get to the content is understandable given their dire need for revenue, but no less annoying to the semi-casual reader.
I wanted to be fair however, as I have always enjoyed the writing on this site, and so I followed the "Day Pass" link to a multi screen Flash commercial highlighting their Personals. The funny thing is, I'm already an avid fan and customer of Salon/Nerve Personals (but that in of itself will be the subject of a whole other entry here...).
The commercial was about 30 seconds long and I had to interact with it to move from screen to screen. I imagine they want to be sure that the visitor is actually looking at the screen and not simply waiting for the Flash animation to finish while they attend to other desktop activities. After clicking through 3 screens I was allowed to enter "Salon Premium".
Will this get tiresome on a daily basis? Sure. Will people end up subscribing just to avoid the click through? Well therein lies my internal conflict.
In my heart, I want to support this site. I reference it on a weekly basis and as I mentioned before, it introduced me to the more intelligent side of online personals. But with the publishing of this story that states they may not make it to March - well, is anyone going to be motivated and supportive enough to subscribe to a dying publication? Will I? Truth be told, despite all my good intentions, no.
Money is tight for all of us right now and the risk of losing even $18.50 is too much to ask. It's too bad this story had to fill me with such doubt as to my ability to save them. Hopefully for Salon I'm alone with this opinion.
But in the meantime, I'll do the click through to get my daily dose of Sex. Fucks knows the "free" porn sites have gotten me used to that.
tips from the tech monkey lovedoll sez so February 16, 2003 01:21 PM
