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By Chris Meadows

rollingstone Peter Kafka at All Things Digital looks at Rolling Stone’s minimalist web strategy. He points out that, unlike many other newspaper and magazine websites, it is actually turning a profit of several million dollars per year—chicken feed for larger corporate operations, but a tidy sum for the small, privately-owned Stone.

But on the other hand, says Kafka, the Rolling Stone website doesn’t have anything like the market share of the web that its print magazine had of the print market in its heyday. Kafka believes that this may be due (in part) to the minimalist, print-replicating format of the website, and suggests that Rolling Stone could draw in more readers by adding archival material:

My two cents: Turn RollingStone.com into an amazing online archive that capitalizes on the magazine’s glory years, when it really was the hub for popular culture. The magazine should have a treasure trove of stuff at its fingertips–interviews, articles, photos,  etc.–but you’d be hard pressed to find any of it on the site now.

Kafka feels it should be relatively inexpensive to repackage and exploit this material that Rolling Stone already has in its vaults. On the other hand, Rolling Stone is turning a profit right now as it is—a rarity in the print-to-web publishing world. There is always a temptation to mess with what works.

 
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