The Web Ride

We saw all kinds of stuff about this a while ago claiming "the end of the free ride" etc saying that all websites were going subscription and nothing on the net would be free anymore. Here's some interesting quotes and predictions from the top net monkeys saying most of the top sites are still evaluating pay subscription stuff in some form. (Not surprising)

"You are hard-pressed to find a media company that's not absolutely ogling subscriptions or some type of paid content, and trying to move there," says Mark Mooradian, vice president and senior analyst at Jupiter Media Metrix. Jupiter forecasts the market for paid content will grow to nearly $5.7 billion by 2005 from $1.1 billion in 2001. Those projections, however, include a broad swath of media, including not just news but also adult entertainment, online gaming, education and music. [snip] Microsoft Corp.'s Slate magazine tried to make readers pay for its news and political commentary back in 1997, but dropped those plans. Editor Michael Kinsley told Slate readers at the time that the publication had "chickened out" on plans to charge for access. Slate resurrected the subscription model in 1998 -- but scrapped it again in February 1999 amid a sharp downturn in the site's traffic.