Slate Is Making Money?

from the astounding dept

Who would have thought it was possible? Slate, the online magazine backed by Microsoft (the only reason it's still around) is now claiming that it made more money then it spent last quarter. Of course, it has some benefits by being a part of Microsoft - in terms of the technology infrastructure to back it up. Still there are some signs quietly appearing that it is possible to make money in online content via advertising. Scary, but true.
Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  • identicon
    kai, 28 Apr 2003 @ 5:48am

    slate/salon/nytimes?

    This interested me because I'm a regular reader of slate, salon and the nytimes.

    I thought we learned from techdirt that nytimes.com is also profitable. Yahoo's news is probably profitable, and I imagine google's news service is--or will be--profitable. Maybe the difference is the amount of original content(?). How about the drudge report--presumably profitable?

    It's a little unfair to compare slate to salon. Salon isn't profitable, but they had a lot fewer advantages than Slate does: Salon's got debt payments to make, they can't use traffic generated from sister sites, they had to code the entire backend from scratch. The question is, if Slate only had Salon's content, would it also be profitable? My guess would be "yes."

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Chris, 28 Apr 2003 @ 8:30am

      Re: slate/salon/nytimes?

      Drudge is making a fortune. Somebody (Business 2.0 maybe?) did a story recently. They figured he is clearing a couple of million in revenue - and his expenses are himsel, an assistant, and his hosting / bandwidth bill. Sounds like a decent income statement in the making there!

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    oi!, 28 Apr 2003 @ 9:14am

    Its totally possible to make a buck at this

    The New York Times recently reported that its online version generated a profit of $8mil last quarter...due entirely to advertising revenue.

    Granted, they pay for the content through the sales of print versions of the paper (the articles are drawn from the same pool of content) and the only difference is that the web versions seem to allow for periodic updating of individual stories (along with that ad in the middle of your monitor.)

    link to this | view in chronology ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.