Salon has been overhauling its site design since late summer, but the changes aren’t just cosmetic. Salon Media CEO Richard Gingras wants to draw more revenue and traffic by developing customized display ad units, bringing in more user-generated content, and putting more focus on e-commerce.

Until now, Salon has mostly just dabbled in e-commerce in the form of once-a-year holiday gift guides. Although he expects advertising to come back, Gingras concedes that marketers’ dollars can’t be relied upon as sole support. That’s why Salon is establishing a permanent online store on Black Friday, the start of the holiday shopping season. On top of that general e-commerce play, early next year Salon will launch a Food channel with a related online store.

By offering a fuller e-commerce service, Salon hopes to broaden its identity beyond its left-of-center political-news slant. “Salon is not just a content brand, it’s a lifestyle brand,” says Gingras, whose involvement with the company dates back to 1995, when he helped put together its initial seed funding. This is all part of Salon’s recent efforts to largely abandon the long-form articles it has been known for. Those efforts have included paring 20 percent of its editorial staff this summer, along with other ongoing efforts to bring costs permanently lower.

“Just as on the editorial side, we cover what we think people will find interesting, the Salon Store will sell products that are intended to match the intrinsic values and interests of our audience. We’re not going to be selling Canon cameras here.”

Instead of high-end electronics or other mass market goods, the Salon Store will be stocked with products from individual craftsmen and various merchants who are selling directly to consumers on the web. “We will carefully identify them and strike an affiliate relationship with them,” Gingras adds. “We will do it with a certain amount of editorial panache, in the sense that there will be content around the items, but these goods will not be selected by our editors. We’ll have other curators who are separate and distinct from the editorial side of the organization handling that.”

Gingras wouldn’t say how much revenue Salon expects to get from e-commerce. But he sees promise in what others have done. One example: UK newspaper publisher Telegraph Media Group, which he says gets 25 percent of its revenues from e-commerce. For the most part, Gingras sees e-commerce playing a supplemental role to advertising, which he adamantly believes can grow, along with the site’s traffic. He believes Salon can satisfy both goals by emphasizing the site’s blogging community, Open Salon.

“We get about 5 million monthly uniques, according to Omniture (NSDQ: OMTR), and our audience demo is well-educated and high-earning, which is a desirable demographic,” Gingras says. “We have about 35,000 bloggers [in Open Salon] and it’s comprised of very accomplished writers, including former journalists and novelists. New Yorker cartoonists, for example, often post their work that the magazine doesn’t take. Most advertisers still shy away from user-generated content. But because of the level of professionalism in our community, that’s not as much of a problem.” That includes Shell Oil and Lexus, who have previously sponsored Open Salon.

One area that Salon has moved away from are paywalls, a model that it helped pioneer. About eight years ago, Salon introduced its first paywall, offering a snippet of premium articles and allowing access on a subscription and pay-per-view basis.  A year later, finding itself in continued financial distress, Salon sought donations, a concept that some newspapers have picked up on over the past year. It also added an ad-supported daypass—look at a sponsor’s ad and get access.

Asked about the value of paywalls for Salon and sites like it, Gingras is pretty dismissive of the idea. But Salon already offers a two-tiered premium subscription model, where a user can pay $45 a year to view the site without ads, while those who pony up a $35 annual fee can get free books from contributors. “That’s about $1 million in revenue,” Gingras says. “That’s still just a modest part of our revenues and it will likely continue to be.”

Even as Salon looks to pull back on its traditional, long-form, magazine-like articles with shorter, bloggier posts, Gingras vows to continue running investigative pieces—whether or not the costs of running such work is matched by ad revenues. The idea is that stories like Salon’s unrelenting coverage of veteran’s issues garner attention and burnish Salon’s brand as an original news source. Would Gingras consider a pay model for Salon’s investigative work? Probably not. Gingras: “I’m not saying we might not [ask readers to pay directly] for things like that in the future. It is something that we’re constantly looking at. But in our experience, the pay model would not support those efforts either. I don’t know that our kind of content has the perceived value that we could make more money out of charging for it, as opposed to putting advertising against it.”

If the lifestyle focus and opening the site to bloggers sounds like Salon is trying to emulate the Huffington Post, Gingras acknowledges the similarity, though he says there’s at least one important difference: “I’m not Arianna Huffington, and I generally believe that to the extent that we can make money off the backs of distributed content, we should be willing to share with contributors. As we evolve programs like this, there will be compensation models tied to performance. If you can drive pageviews and we’re able to convert those pageviews into incremental revenue, we should be sharing some of that back.”

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