Pulse to Cease Web Publishing
Friday, June 29, 2007 at 7:23 am
- 10 Comments
After its weekly print publication shut down more than a month ago, the last vital sign of Pulse of the Twin Cities — its daily news website — is fading away. “Pulse is dead,” music editor Dwight Hobbes confirmed in an email. “It hasn’t been on the stands in six weeks and www.pulsetc.com won’t be online after [tomorrow, June 29].”
On Wednesday, Pulse sales director David Goldstein emailed an advertiser, “Things are going well with our transition to a daily online magazine.” The ad-rate sheet he attached stated the site gets “1.3 million hits and 70,000 unique visitors per month.” But apparently that traffic wasn’t translating into incomes big enough to sustain the operation.
Hobbes said Pulse “hemorrhaged cash for a decade after which [publisher] Ed Felien closed shop. He’s closing www.pulsetc.com for the same reason.”
The site’s demise concludes a turbulent few months for Minneapolis-based Pulse. In May, Felien abruptly fired former music editor Steve McPherson and writer Max Sparber, who authored a 2007 Frank Premack Award-winning Pulse story on homelessness with Steve Butcher, Lydia Howell and Phil Willkie. According to a comment by McPherson on MNspeak, where Sparber is now editor, Felien disagreed with his taking content he’d created for the Pulse music blog to his new site. “Ed seemed to feel that he owned that content, despite me not actually being paid for doing it — beyond updating it at work in-between other projects — and spending a lot of free time on it,” he wrote. Felien quickly posted a classified ad looking for a new managing editor.
Reached Friday morning, Felien confirmed the news, stating that there aren’t enough ads coming in to fund the publication. He said there were few other cost-cutting options left to him. “It’s pretty bare bones right now. I don’t know what else we could cut.”
Felien, who started Pulse a decade ago, also publishes Southside Pride, a weekly that serves the Nokomis, Riverside, and Phillips/Powderhorn neighborhoods. He says that publication will continue.
10 Comments
Comment posted June 29, 2007 @ 9:25 am
One less vibrant voice fades Honestly, Twin Cities without the Pulse is booooooooooooring.
Comment posted June 29, 2007 @ 10:02 am
Monthly Pride Southside Pride is a free monthly (not a weekly) that is delivered door to door.
Comment posted June 29, 2007 @ 10:33 am
never fear… in about a month, there will be a great new Mpls online magazine on the scene and Pulse will be quickly forgotten…
Comment posted July 3, 2007 @ 4:15 pm
Numbers While that may sound like a lot of readers, 70,000 uniques a month is only twice what Sitemeter shows for my blog, and less than my Webalyzer ISP stats. That’s only 2,000 unique readers a day in a metro area with 2.5 million potential readers.
I mourn Pulse, but that’s simply not a viable set of numbers. I stopped doing ads because I couldn’t justify the cost to advertisers vis a vis traffic. To be minimally viable (as a 2-3 person part-time gig), they would have needed at least twice that traffic. To be viable with the staff they had, they needed at least ten times that many readers.
Anyone know what MNspeak has for readership?
Comment posted July 6, 2007 @ 12:00 pm
Yep. Under Rex, MNspeak was getting 10,000 unique visitors a day. Matt Bartel, in comments at MNspeak, said this:
Google analytics tells me that we get closer to 2,000 unique visitors a day and about 40-50,000 per month. I’ve seen the stats program that Rex used, too (through HostMySite, where we’re hosted) and I think it over-reports. We get about 50,000 pageviews a week.
Comment posted June 29, 2007 @ 4:25 am
One less vibrant voice fades Honestly, Twin Cities without the Pulse is booooooooooooring.
Comment posted June 29, 2007 @ 5:02 am
Monthly Pride Southside Pride is a free monthly (not a weekly) that is delivered door to door.
Comment posted June 29, 2007 @ 5:33 am
never fear… in about a month, there will be a great new Mpls online magazine on the scene and Pulse will be quickly forgotten…
Comment posted July 3, 2007 @ 11:15 am
Numbers While that may sound like a lot of readers, 70,000 uniques a month is only twice what Sitemeter shows for my blog, and less than my Webalyzer ISP stats. That's only 2,000 unique readers a day in a metro area with 2.5 million potential readers.
I mourn Pulse, but that's simply not a viable set of numbers. I stopped doing ads because I couldn't justify the cost to advertisers vis a vis traffic. To be minimally viable (as a 2-3 person part-time gig), they would have needed at least twice that traffic. To be viable with the staff they had, they needed at least ten times that many readers.
Anyone know what MNspeak has for readership?
Comment posted July 6, 2007 @ 7:00 am
Yep. Under Rex, MNspeak was getting 10,000 unique visitors a day. Matt Bartel, in comments at MNspeak, said this:
Google analytics tells me that we get closer to 2,000 unique visitors a day and about 40-50,000 per month. I've seen the stats program that Rex used, too (through HostMySite, where we're hosted) and I think it over-reports. We get about 50,000 pageviews a week.
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