Online Magazine Slate Sold

Slate, the online political and general interest magazine created by Microsoft in 1996, has been sold to the Washington Post Company for an undisclosed amount. The sale reflects Microsoft’s declining interest in producing original content, but the company denied any plans to sell other content assets, such as its stake in cable and Internet news venture MSNBC (co-owned by Microsoft and GE). Slate will continue to be an MSN content partner, and most of the magazine’s 30 or so employees, who are based primarily in New York and Washington, D.C., will remain on staff.

Slate was proposed to Microsoft executives by well-known political journalist Michael Kinsley, who positioned it as an experiment in the new medium of the Web. Microsoft accepted his offer as part of a broad effort to build interest in the Web in general and MSN specifically. Kinsley stepped down for health reasons in 2002. (See “Slate Founder Steps Down” on page 20 of the Mar. 2002 Update.)

Although Slate experimented with paid subscriptions from 1998 to 1999, for most of its existence the magazine has been free to users and supported exclusively by advertising. It has been fairly successful by the standards of online political magazines, with 6 million unique monthly visitors in Nov. 2004 (according to Nielsen/NetRatings), annual revenues of about US$6 million (according to unconfirmed reports), and slim profits or break-even status since early 2003 (according to Microsoft). By way of comparison, Slate’s main competitor, Salon, which has both paying subscribers and a free advertising-supported business, reported an average of about 3 million unique monthly visitors and a US$6 million loss on US$4.5 million in revenues in its most recent fiscal year (ended Mar. 31, 2004).