Content Creep Check-In: Salon’s Record Numbers
A few days ago I noted the continuing erosion of “content” based businesses; businesses that use page views and revenue, not quality, to gauge their output.
But enough of the Demand Media deathwatch, today we have some good news: Salon has turned themselves around by focusing on quality first. Kerry Lauerman, editor in chief of Salon, explains how Salon achieved a record year in 2011 and sees trends continuing in January:
We’ve also — completely against the trend — slowed down our process. We’ve tried to work longer on stories for greater impact, and publish fewer quick-takes that we know you can consume elsewhere. We’re actually publishing, on average, roughly one-third fewer posts on Salon than we were a year ago (from 848 to 572 in December; 943 to 602 in January). So: 33 percent fewer posts; 40 percent greater traffic. [emphasis mine]
What makes this all the more impressive is that only few years ago Salon was making the standard metric-centric decisions which lead to the content-crunch:
A few years ago, as Salon (like all publications), tried to right our ship in deeply troubled recessionary waters, we followed the familiar script of other sites — we laid off terrific staffers to lower our costs; we brutally pared down our expenses; we revamped staff priorities so that writers could simply produce more; we experimented in a fair amount of low-calorie aggregation. And yes, there’s that word: Aggregation, the most inflammatory (and sometimes, hilarious) in our industry… At its worst, we monitored Twitter and Google for trending topics, and dispatched an intern to cobble together our own summary of it, posted it quickly, then prayed to the Google gods that the effort would win, if only briefly, their favor.
Congratulations are in order to Lauerman and his team. It’s great to see Lauerman and Salon’s founder/CEO David Talbot betting on quality and succeeding. (Via Kerry Lauerman)
