Salon was created in the wake of the
San Francisco newspaper strike of 1994, by former
San Francisco Examiner arts and features editor
David Talbot who wished to explore the potential of
Web. It launched as salon1999.com and salonmag.com in November 1995. In its early days, readers noticed a specifically Northern California flavor. In 1996, Talbot agreed: "We swim in the soup of San Francisco. There are a lot of odd fish we've plucked out of the bay here and it gives us some of that Left Coast, Weird Coast style."
Time magazine named it one of the Best Web Sites of 1996.
Salon purchased the
virtual community The WELL in April 1999 (switching to its current URL, salon.com, at roughly that time), and made its
initial public offering (IPO) of Salon.com on the
NASDAQ stock exchange on June 22 of that year. Subsequently, for the month of October 1999,
Nielsen/NetRatings reported that
Salon had over two million users.
Salon Premium, a pay-to-view (online) content subscription was introduced on April 25, 2001. The service signed up 130,000 subscribers and staved off discontinuation of services. However, in November 2002, the company announced it had accumulated cash and non-cash losses of $80 million, and by February 2003 it was having difficulty paying its rent and made an appeal for donations to keep the company running. On October 9, 2003, Michael O'Donnell, the
chief executive and president of Salon Media Group, said he was leaving the company after seven years because it was "time for a change." When he left, Salon.com had accrued $83.6 million in losses since its inception, and its stock traded for 5¢ on the
OTC Bulletin Board. David Talbot,
Salon's chairman and editor-in-chief at the time, became the new chief executive. Elizabeth "Betsy" Hambrecht, then
Salon's
chief financial officer, became the president. In July 2008,
Salon launched
Open Salon, a "social content site" and "curated blog network". On July 16, 2012,
Salon announced that it would be featuring content from
Mondoweiss. Salon Media Group sold
The WELL to the group of members in September 2012.
Business model and operations Since 2007, the company has been dependent upon repeated cash injections from board Chairman
John Warnock and
William Hambrecht, father of former
Salon CEO Elizabeth Hambrecht. During the nine months ending on December 31, 2012, these cash contributions amounted to $3.4 million, compared to revenue in the same period of $2.7 million. In December 2016 and January 2017, the company was evicted from its New York offices at 132 West 31st Street, a block from
Madison Square Garden, for non-payment of $90,000 in back rent. In February 2017, Spear Point Capital invested $1 million into Salon, taking a 29% equity stake and three seats on the company's board. On August 30, 2019, Salon.com was sold for $5 million by Salon Media Group () to privately held Salon.com, LLC, which is owned by
Chris Richmond and Drew Schoentrup. Aspects of the Salon.com site offerings, ordered by advancing date: • Free content: around 15 new articles posted per day, revenues wholly derived from in-page advertisements. • Per-day new content was reduced for a time. •
Salon Premium subscription: Approximately 20 percent of new content was made available to subscribers only. Other subscription benefits included free magazines and ad-free viewing. Larger, more conspicuous ad units were introduced for non-subscribers. • A hybrid subscription model: Readers can now read content by viewing a 15-second full screen advertisement to earn a "day pass" or gain access by subscribing to
Salon Premium. •
Salon Core: After
Salon Premium subscriptions declined from about 100,000 to 10,000, it was rebranded in 2011 as
Salon Core subscriptions featuring a different mix of benefits. == Critiques ==