As a fan of Salon, I’m willing to pay for its content in order to help keep the publication alive. The premium content is, for the moment, fairly thin. Salon promises to expand it.
But the site deserves a small slap for the way it’s handling the question of serving advertising-free content.
Go to the Introducing Salon Premium page, and you’ll see that the first of the exclusive benefits is the ability to “Read Salon without encountering banner and ‘pop-up ads” — certainly a welcome feature. But you discover that Salon Premium subscribers “have the option of ‘turning off’ banner and ‘pop-up’ ads on most Salon pages” — in other words, even paying customers must take the trouble to opt out. Then, when you click on the link that provides “details and exceptions” you discover that there are some gaping holes in the opting out.
I’ll probably still go ahead and subscribe, but Salon isn’t going to win too many fans with this approach.