I’ve been mulling over a number for the past week - 15.6 million. It’s Slate’s ad revenue in 2005 according to TNS Media Intelligence as reported in an imporant, though seemingly undiscussed, article on Slate in the June 26th edition of Advertising Age.

As background, Slate has been around for awhile; ostensibly, it’s an odd duck as an online-only “magazine” with a staff of writers and editors contributing to a centralized web outlet. The property has garnered a fair amount of cachet, first as a herald of media’s transformation in 1996 when the site launched (a year broadly pointed to as the “tipping point” in Internet adoption), and more generally for the quality of its content. Ironically, as Advertising Age astutely points out (thanks to Jeff Jarvis), the site may turn out only a half-step towards the online media archetype, stuck in a centralized model that’s being punctuated online by distributed content aggregation. (My “online-only magazine” is Bloglines. I’m the chief editor, supported by others at Share Your OPML, and my feeds are the articles.)

Back to 15.6 million. I’ve been mulling about it because it’s not terribly impressive. AdAge’s article cites Nielsen/NetRatings as recording an average of 5 million unique visitors per month to Slate between January and May of this year. A quick check of Slate’s Alexa traffic stats shows the site’s traffic actually diminished slightly over the last six months, so let’s not assume there was a lot of growth over 2005 and use our 2006 numbers as proxy. $15.6 million for the year equates to $1.3 million in ad revenue per month, or $0.26/unique visitor, using 5 million uniques a month. 26 cents per individual per month. Media upstarts beware: either deliver a product with such broad appeal and quality that it attracts an enormous user base on relatively fixed costs, or find a niche where one can garner premium ad rates (e.g. IT). Slate’s somewhere in between, and ancillary revenue opportunities are going to be harder for the content creator to hold in a distributed media world.