Salon Debuts Open Salon Beta

Posted on August 11, 2008

CNET Caroline McCarth reports that Salon.com has launched Open Salon, a social blogging site where bloggers can be tipped using a micropayments service. There is an intro post here by Open Salon director Kerry Lauerman about the site which has been running in beta for several months.

Open Salon is a social content site we hope to officially launch later this year. We've been hosting a lively private beta test for several months now, with about 1,300 or our closest friends. We're now pleased to open the door for everyone else.
What, precisely, can you do here? After a quick registration, you can start blogging immediately -- and rating and commenting on other posts, messaging other members, and more. You can also invite other members into Open Salon from your own blog page.
The Open Salon home page functions like a real-time magazine cover. We spotlight the best content, but you can also see what other members are reading, rating and commenting on. A new issue goes up every evening at 8 p.m. ET; we update the cover every morning at 11 a.m. ET, and as necessary. In the near future, we'll begin featuring the best Open Salon content on the cover of Salon.com. We'll also be unveiling ways for you to earn money for your great work on Open. More to come.

The payment (or tipping) service that Open Salon uses is called Tippem. Tippem was established out of a partnership between Salon and Revolution MoneyExchange, a peer-to-peer payment service that allows people to send and receive money with no fees between account holders.

The Inquisitr questions how much bloggers could really make on Open Salon.

The idea of opening up a site such as Salon to the general public and featuring all these new kinds of content is fantastic. But is compensating contributors solely on a tip-based system the right way to do it? Sure, if everyone who visited the site threw in a couple bucks, it'd probably add up - but realistically, any contributor is likely to get maybe a dollar or two for any given post. Maybe.

We have seen micropayments used in the past with services like the Amazon's Honor Payment System. The Honor Payment System works for payments as small as $1.00. However, the Honor Payment System didn't really work as a large source of revenues for publishers. But even with the promise of very low payments, Open Salon may still interest some writers if the readership is going to be large enough.