Are Slate and Salon.com Competition?: Job Weisberg tries to answer the eternal question: “The rest of the world may see them as rivals but Weisberg insists he doesn’t see Salon as a competitor. ‘We don’t really think of it that way. We’re a very different kind of magazine.’ Referring to Salon’s premium subscription offer, he added: ‘They’ve decided to make a mistake we made three years ago (when Slate charged for content). I think it’ll be a shame if they close up.’”

“As for dropping the subscription model (I was one of the roughly 26,000 paid subscribers and, yes, I subscribe to Salon), Moore calls it a ‘huge boon to the business.’ Approximately 200,000 unique visitors went to Slate.com in January 1999, the last paid month. This past May, the site drew an estimated 4.2 million unique users according to MediaMetrix, ‘an enormous audience,’ says Moore. The average visit is twice a month with an average length of about 9 minutes.”