Salon.com (Nasdaq: SALN), a leading Internet media company, today announced that its site traffic on the Salon.com network surged in November 2000 to over 50 million page views, the largest traffic month recorded in its five year history. Led by Salon's ambitious political coverage of the 2000 Presidential Election, Salon also recorded its single biggest traffic day ever on November 8th, the day after the election, with 1.9 million page views.
Says Michael O'Donnell, CEO and president of Salon.com, "Salon continues to be a trusted source for breaking news and analysis, and our comprehensive coverage of the presidential election and the aftermath in Florida attracted millions of viewers to the Salon network. This significant traffic growth over the last six months, despite a reduction in our overall marketing costs, shows our brand's strength, staying power and long term prospects."
Recently, Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism awarded Salon two prestigious Online Journalism Awards -- for "General Excellence in Online Journalism Original to the Web," and for "Enterprise Journalism" for the investigative piece "Prime-time propaganda" by Dan Forbes. The awards are sponsored by the Online News Association at Columbia's journalism school, which also administers the Pulitzer Prizes and the National Magazine Awards.
Audited traffic numbers will be available from the Audit Bureau of Circulations in late December.
About Salon: Founded in 1995, Salon.com is a leading Internet media company that produces 10 award-winning, original content sites; maintains Salon Shop, an e-commerce gateway; and hosts two communities -- Table Talk and The WELL. In May 2000, Salon acquired MP3Lit.com, the pioneering Web site offering quality spoken word and audio literature recordings. In October, 2000, Salon.com launched Salon Audio, a site offering 24-hour music programming, daily downloads and streaming audio from Salon's favorite columnists, as well as hundreds of downloadable versions of short stories, poems and interviews in MP3 and Real Audio formats. Over 530 companies have advertised on Salon.com including IBM, Lexus, Microsoft, EDS, Hewlett-Packard, Mastercard, AskJeeves, Virgin Megastore Online, Kimberly Clark, and Intel. In December 1999, Salon.com announced a content and equity agreement with Rainbow Media Holdings, Inc., a subsidiary of Cablevision Systems Corporation and NBC. Strategic distribution partners include America Online (AOL), TheStreet.com, CNN.com and CNet as well as wireless innovator AvantGo. The site had 2.6 million unique visitors in September 2000 as audited by ABC Interactive, a subsidiary of the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
SOURCE Salon.com
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