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.
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slate/salon/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."
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Re: slate/salon/nytimes?
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Its totally possible to make a buck at this
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.)
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