Refashioned Salon's Traffic Soars

Over the past year, Salon CEO Richard Gingras has retooled the 15-year-old quality-content site in an effort to reverse its flagging financial fortunes.

The first goal toward that end would be increasing traffic, and today the company announced it has succeeded in attracting 35 percent more users during March 2010, as compared to March 2009.

Salon says that for Q-1 this year, its audience is up 22 percent over the same quarter last year.

Gingras places a high value on certain metrics, one of which is referral traffic, which has soared 125 percent year over year. Another key metric -- converting these referred users into regular visitors. The company points to a 35 percent increase in its "branded traffic" (direct visits via bookmarks or typed URLs) since the beginning of 2009.

“Salon is a lifestyle brand,” says Gingras. “It conveys a certain intelligence, a challenge to the status quo, an edge that advertisers like.”

Accordingly, he has expanded coverage in lifestyle topics such as food, film and books.

The key to Salon, since its launch in 1995, has been consistently high-quality content delivered with attitude. So it was a bit of a surprise that when the digital National Magazine Award nominations were announced earlier this year, Salon was overlooked.

Six online-only magazines were nominated: Epicurious; The Daily Beast; Life; Slate; Tablet; and Yale Environment 360.

(Update: Salon says that it no longer consider itself as a magazine, but a news site, so the National Magazine Awards are not a relevant measure of the quality of the site's content.)

Nevertheless, the real test of Salon's success will be on the balance sheet, which in recent years had been miserable. Progress there will reinforce the company's new direction and position it to win awards in future years.

Related post:

Salon.com Relaunch Features New Emphasis on Growing Revenue
"During the latter part of 1995, Apple executive Richard Gingras was in the process of overseeing the dismantling of his company’s ill-fated eWorld offering, when David Talbot and a small band of journalists bolted from the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner to launch an online magazine called Salon..."

Disclosure: I worked at Salon in 1995 and again from 1998-2000.