{"id":506981,"date":"2010-04-02T15:51:18","date_gmt":"2010-04-02T19:51:18","guid":{"rendered":"tag:contentnext.com,2010-04-02:article\/419-salons-traffic-rises-but-ads-struggle-ceo-says-ipad-is-fatal-distractio"},"modified":"2010-04-02T15:51:18","modified_gmt":"2010-04-02T19:51:18","slug":"salons-traffic-rises-but-ads-struggle-ceo-calls-ipad-a-fatal-distraction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/506981","title":{"rendered":"Salon’s Traffic Rises, But Ads Struggle; CEO Calls iPad A ‘Fatal Distraction’"},"content":{"rendered":"

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If you want proof that more traffic doesn’t necessarily translate into more ad revenues, consider the news and culture site Salon<\/a>. The site credits last November’s design overhaul with growing the site to 6.3 million global users in March, a 35 percent versus the same period last year, according to internal Omniture (NSDQ: OMTR<\/a>) numbers. The site says traffic is up 22 percent for Q1 as well. But Salon CEO Richard Gingras<\/strong> says that doesn’t mean that ad dollars are rolling in proportionately. “We do see signals of advertising coming back, but it’s not coming back as fast as we’d hoped. The economy is still weak and media buyers are still cautious.”\n<\/p>\n

comScore (NSDQ: SCOR<\/a>) puts Salon’s traffic for February at 3 million visitors in the U.S., putting it behind sites like Slate.com<\/a>, which ranks last on comScore’s top 10 general news sites, with 4.5 million unique visitors. So Salon, which has been around since 1995, has a lot of catching up to do. Aside from the redesign, which emphasized shorter, punchier content, Gingras credited smarter search- and-distribution strategies for pulling in bigger audiences. “We’ve been able to drive referral traffic up from search engines, social media sites, and third-parties, which is tricky to attract because it is directly dependent on site content.”<\/p>\n

The site certainly benefited from the interest in the healthcare debate, but Gingras wants to ensure that Salon doesn’t have to rely mostly on big news items. He started building out into verticals like Salon’s food channel, which also includes e-commerce. He plans to add more verticals in the coming months, but he declined to say what other areas Salon will be branching out into. Possible areas include more consumer-electronics and women’s content. “It\u2019s important for Salon to expand beyond news and politics,” Gingras said. “Aside from having clearly defined topic pages, you have to be opportunistic with editorial content on the web. It\u2019s driven by editorial personality, and we’re trying to develop those voices as well.”<\/p>\n

Gingras says mobile will also get more attention, with iPhone and Android apps in the works. He expects to charge around $2 for the app downloads.“I don’t see charging for subscriptions on phones either, since we’ve had experience with paywalls and they weren’t successful.” <\/p>\n

As for the iPad? “Personally, I\u2019m eagerly awaiting the iPad,” he says. “I\u2019m not spending a whole lot of time thinking about it for Salon, though. I think the iPad is a fatal distraction for publishers. They have this view that it will save them and help bring back the old model. That’s not going to happen. If it becomes a more commonly used device, I could see creating something special for it. But not right now.”\n<\/p>\n

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If you want proof that more traffic doesn’t necessarily translate into more ad revenues, consider the news and culture site Salon. The site credits last November’s design overhaul with growing the site to 6.3 million global users in March, a 35 percent versus the same period last year, according to internal Omniture (NSDQ: OMTR) numbers. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":681,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-506981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/681"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=506981"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506981\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=506981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=506981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=506981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}