Web Survival Guidelines for small magazines

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, March, 2000 by Cheryl Woodard

Opera News outsources ad sales as well as maintenance of its bulletin board, which generates 80 percent of the site's roughly 16,000 total monthly visits. The result, says publisher Hildt, is that Opera News has a robust Web presence without having added a single person to the staff. "After a very short time, the rep firm is bringing in some very classy advertisers and breakeven revenues," Hildt says. "We've got excellent content, some of it contributed by experts who simply presented themselves to us--out of the woodwork, so to speak. And best of all, the site is furthering our mission, which is to encourage the appreciation of opera in ways the print magazine could never have done."

Of all the publishers included in this report, Hildt has spent the most money-- $60,000--on his Web site. But the only dedicated Web staff position at Opera News Online will be an editorial assistant (yet to be hired), who will handle customer-service e-mail, monitor the bulletin board listings, and spend a couple of days per month converting Quark files to HTML pages. Everything else will continue to be handled by the magazine's regular 20-person staff: "Our running cost is just a few hundred dollars a month. And since we made almost $800 in ad income last month, we're technically profitable, at least on a month-to-month basis," says Hildt.

Just a start, to be sure, but not bad for a small-magazine Web site.

Cheryl Woodard is a cofounder of PC Magazine, PC World, Macworld and Publish magazines. She currently offers strategic business consulting services to magazine, Web and newsletter publishers.