Salon announced on Thursday that it had published its last story after 31 years, telling readers that “our publishing model is no longer sustainable.” The site was the oldest general-interest magazine on the internet, launched in November 1995 by David Talbot, a former arts editor at the San Francisco Examiner, and a handful of other colleagues who had walked out during that publication’s 1994 newspaper strike.

Slate — which is still around, albeit in a much-diminished form — arrived a year later. For online readers in the late-Nineties and 2000s, the two sites were where the essay lived, before the pop-ups and the paywalls arrived. Salon showcased writing by the likes of Jake Tapper, Andrew Sullivan, Dave Eggers and Camille Paglia. It also ran the story that kickstarted my freelance career — a confession about managing an Abercrombie & Fitch store that went viral in 2014.

It’s a sad fall for the publication. Salon went public on the Nasdaq in June 1999 at a valuation of $107 million, yet never turned a profit. By 2005, the company had accumulated $83.6 million in losses and its stock traded for five cents. Talbot admitted that Salon was “more tabloid-like” than it had been at launch. After changes to the Facebook algorithm cut Salon’s revenue by over a third and its traffic by 23% in a single year, the two owners of Snopes bought the site for $5 million in 2019. In 2023, they sold it to a Malta-based company whose other properties included CCN.com and Cryptomaniaks. Thursday’s closure put 19 full-time employees and a handful of contractors out of work.

By the time my Abercrombie confession ran in its virtual pages, Salon was largely a clickbait operation, but it still had enough clout for the article to receive widespread pick-up in other outlets. Few sites now provide unknown writers with such opportunities, and several publications which fulfilled this aim are already gone. BuzzFeed News won a Pulitzer in 2021 and then closed two years later. Jezebel shut down shortly afterwards. Vice, valued at $5.7 billion in 2017, stopped publishing on vice.com in February 2024.

There is still some cause for optimism, at least among publications with more focused remits and dedicated readerships. Substack reports over five million paid subscriptions. More than 50 of its publications clear $1 million a year (my own isn’t one of them). The Onion, under well-funded new ownership, has rediscovered some of its biting humor from the early-Nineties and publishes a monthly print edition that ships to 50 countries.

Rich patrons and paying readers have shown a willingness to subsidize the copy they care about but, at the end of its long run, Salon had access to neither category of funder. Because there’s no longer any money to be made from general-interest magazines, it’s unlikely that anything similar will ever take its place.

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Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

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