• by Tom Hespos , June 2, 2003

In the long term, I don't know whether Salon will thrive or crater. F--ked Company's constant warnings about its cash situation notwithstanding, Salon has been one of my daily surf stops for years, and I'd hate to see it go.

Live or die, Salon will always be cool in my book. Not only do I love the content, but I love what it's done for the industry. I can't think of another content site that has experimented with its ad model as extensively as Salon has. Every time it has done so, the trade press gave it plenty of ink, while publishers kept an eye peeled to see whether the new model would work.

A while back, Salon moved to a variant of the paid content model. Many stories on the site are part of Salon Premium, and unless readers pay a fee, they see only the first couple paragraphs of a story (usually just enough to become really interested in it) before they're cut off and Salon pitches them on the benefits of a Premium membership. Personally, while I'm a big fan of Salon's content, I haven't yet ponied up. (Maybe someday when I have more time to enjoy the site...)

I really like the latest chapter in Salon's ad model saga. Sunday night, when I pointed my browser toward Salon, I encountered a splash screen that offered me a free one-day pass for Salon Premium, courtesy of a sponsor, Windows XP. I sat through an Ultramercial and then arrived at another screen that essentially told me that my free pass to the premium content was on Microsoft's dime.

This is a great idea - a true site sponsorship. I think Salon did a great job of aligning the value of its site (first-class, premium content) with the presence of the advertiser. Microsoft's agency could have taken the easy way out and simply sprinkled the site with a few million Windows XP popup ads, but instead, they decided to take a different approach and embrace the value that Salon readers get out of the site.

Of course, while I had my day of freedom, I read as much of the premium stuff as I could get my mitts on. Microsoft's sponsorship reminded me of what I was missing by giving me a brief taste of the premium content. (I bet Salon's new subscriptions increase in the days after the sponsorship is over.) Now that I've been reminded that the site has some really thought-provoking content, I may cave in and send Salon the 30 clams a year it charges for a premium subscription with no ads.

I think one of the reasons I like Salon's experiment so much is that it aligns nicely with something I've been saying for a couple of years now. The Internet is a crowded place, with messages both commercial and non-commercial competing with one another for consumer attention. Thus, it becomes necessary to extend value to the consumer, so that they can not only know the value of your offering, but experience it as well. Only then can they make an informed judgment about whether or not your product or service is relevant enough to their lives to merit paying what you're asking. Salon's sponsored one-day pass not only allows potential subscribers to make that judgment, but it also gives Microsoft the ability to score brownie points with those potential subscribers by being the ones to bestow said value.

Keep on experimenting, Salon. In doing so, I think you're going to teach this industry something about paid content models.