Salon online magazine tops 4 million visitors a month

For those of you who wondered whether online magazines can work, Salon is a good -- if rare -- example. When it was launched back in 1995 (the internet equivalent of the Pleistocene age) it was hot and promising. Then people cooled to it as the internet bubble burst but, somehow, Salon carried on. It tinkered with its revenue model (free access, paid access, ad-free access and so on) but now seems to have not only outlasted the skeptics, it is growing (2006-07 revenue $7.7 million) and apparently prospering, according to a story in PR Week.

In the past two years, the company says, unique visitors have risen from 2.2 million to 4 million per month, and page views have shot up from 27 million in 2005 to about 40 million in 2007. Salon has somehow managed the rarely duplicated feat of riding out the tech boom as a respected online media outlet without sacrificing its own credibility in the process.

Salon was skewed to arts and culture at the beginning, but has morphed into much more political journalism and solid reporting than other online political sites, including scoops like the story that Henry Hyde, former head of the House Judiciary Committee who presided over the Clinton impeachment trial, had an affair of his own. More recently, Salon obtained and published internal Army files regarding abuses at Abu Ghraib, including horrific photos.

"We'd come out of a bruising election year, and we had a heavy politics readership," says editor-in-chief Joan Walsh. "And I really wanted to brand us as a place for breaking, reliable, trustworthy news. We're known for commentary, and our commentary is terrific, but the thing I've admired over the years is [that] the thing that's put us on the map has had to do with breaking news stories that you could trust."