21st

Sun, 22 Jun 1997 19:00:00 +0000

As the former editor of Playboy's interviews and TV Guide's features, I've gone long and I've gone short. Now, as editor-in-chief of Yahoo! Internet Life, I'm long on its prospects, both in print and online. For those who believe print is a dinosaur when it comes to covering the online world, my experience -- so far -- may be instructive. That this appears in an online magazine I leave to the ironists among us.

A moment of background: YIL is now the leading Internet publication (covering the Web's "content," rather than its products or technique), with a circulation of 300,000, a rise of 200 percent in 12 months. Pardon the promotion, but judge relevancy for yourself: My publisher tells me those stats make us the fastest-growing consumer magazine in America. Our Web site, linked from the Yahoo directory, gets 2 million views a month, so we're doing well on that side, too. The sweet spot is that besides hefty newsstand sales, our print circulation comes entirely from online sub promotion on the Yahoo directory, after readers receive a free copy and peruse much of the content online. (We're a Ziff-Davis publication in partnership with Yahoo!, but editorially independent.) In other words, people are signing up for a print magazine about the online world that is both promoted and, for the most part, posted online.

Salon.com > Barry Golson

21st