Myspace, another web drive service to stop free offer: "Regrettably, Myspace is discontinuing its free consumer service. We will be bringing the service back online so that you can get your files. The service will be available from 12:00PM PST Tuesday May 29 until 5:00 PM PST Friday June 1st inclusive. THIS WILL BE THE ONLY PERIOD OF TIME YOU WILL BE ABLE TO RETRIEVE YOUR FILES!"

They send you to FreeDrive, which would have a hard time stopping its free service!

06/07/2001 update: In Web Storage World, No Space at Myspace.

Bitlocker offered useful web database tools for quickly building applications. (Note past tense.)

IMPORTANT NOTICE!

As of June 15, 2001, the Bitlocker service will no longer be available. Please export your data before this date as you will not have access to it afterwards.

Sincerely,
The Bitlocker Team

The Standard: More Pay, Less Play?: "The newest flash points come from ad-supported Internet service provider NetZero and content site Salon.com: Betting that Web ads have reached a pitch too grating for many consumers, they're encouraging users to pay them for an ad-free version. The new strategy poses a number of problems, not the least of which is that people prefer things that are free. On the other hand, if it works, marketers might have a real reason to feel spooked."

Business 2.0: Pay to Play: "The truth is that most sites can't simply flip a switch and go purely paid. It involves too much risk. If you have an established brand and a real business, expectations are that most of what you put online should be free. Like it or not."

This just in from the popular small-biz e-commerce provider Bigstep.com...
The "bad" news: basic service will no longer be free.
The good news: they seem likely to stick around for their customers.

"Dear Bigstep.com member,

This letter is to announce that in early June we'll be introducing Bigstep 2.0, a new version of our service with lots of new features for a broader range of small businesses. As part of this transition, we'll be asking all of our members to sign up for one of three new Bigstep Services, ranging in price from $9.95 to $34.95 per month, by June 30th.

Why the change? Though we've all heard the news about struggling dot coms recently, I'm happy to say that, thanks to your support, Bigstep.com is alive and well. We have money in the bank, enthusiastic investors, and thousands of successful members. Nevertheless, the reality is that the cost of serving all our members still exceeds the revenue we bring in. In order to serve all of our members better, we need to ask everyone to take on a more equitable share of what it costs to sustain your web sites. This will also allow us to make more of you happier by adding the new features you've been requesting."

SiliconValley.com: As revenue falls, more sites are moving from free to fee: "Yet only a handful of online ventures -- even with brand-name offerings -- have been successful at charging for content. Among them is a non-profit. Consumer Reports, the independent product-rating service, has charged for either monthly or yearly online subscriptions since its 1997 Internet debut. Today, it counts 560,000 online subscribers, compared with 4 million who get the magazine."

End of the free web? Punters prepared to pay for content: "According to a report published today by payment technology company Mondex International, 57 per cent of surfers are willing to fork out for various online services."

Mondex will issue a report tomorrow, but something tells me they're a bit biased. Can you imagine a payment company publishing a study that would go like: "98% of users won't spend a dime online ; senior executive team approves collective suicide"?

About the Donation Project: "Imagine an internet where web users voluntarily paid for the content they consume - from words to to art to music. Not because they have to, but because they want to. Because they want to support the people that produce the content they rely on daily. It already happens with shareware and open source. It can happen on your site too."

For what it's worth: content on the web: "A couple of weeks ago, I asked readers what they'd be willing to pay for, as financially strapped Web sites shift from free to fee-based service."

The CoWorking Institute said "Zkey is a Virtual Office. It's free. It has utilities for document collaboration, chat and threaded discussions, e-mail and a shared appointment book." Zkey says "due to changing market conditions Zkey has closed our free, web-based personal information service as of May 10, 2001 in order to focus on our mobile transations software business ..."

Homestead announced that: 'Due to current business conditions and changes in our partners' business directions, the following services will be discontinued at the end of June: Homestead E-mail Center , Message Boards Element and Homestead Photos.'

I suppose it's kinda cheesy to mention here that Coolboard Express is shutting down, as explained on Metafilter today--with comments referencing TheEndOfFree.

Microsoft's bCentral offers company's first real stab at ASP model: "About 1.6 million users have registered for some bCentral service; about 60,000 are subscribers to the paid services"

That would mean a 3.75% customer-to-user ratio. If they pay about $25 a month, that translates into $1.5M or $18M a year. About what Microsoft as a whole sells every 6 hours, but quite significant if you compare it to other ASPs.

07/12/01 update: ASP Revenues Soar, Profits Coming Soon will give you a sense of what the biggest ASPs are making.

Unleashing the ideavirus: a conversation with Seth Godin: "[D]on’t forget that the ideavirus follows a life cycle. Your job is to decide at which moment you will shift from paying to spread the ideavirus, to charging the user and profiting from it."

Timing is very important to the successful introduction of a paying service piggybacking a free one. The more you wait, the more people get used to the free lunch and expect it to remain so (or even feel they have a right to it). Maybe starting free and paying options right from the start would alleviate transition problems. Companies would still have to properly position them one against the other (give enough but not too much for free).

Slate's Michael Kinsley: It's Not Just the Internet: "Almost no one pays for content in any medium."
(Link credit: Kathryn Yu).

Old but relevant to the academic and scientific world: Publish Free or Perish, Auditing Classes at M.I.T., on the Web and Free (see also the MIT's site).

05/27/01 update: Science world in revolt at power of the journal owners.

07/12/01 update: Information Wants to be Valuable.

Reuters: Terra Lycos to begin charging for services: "Twenty-four percent of our world subscribers already pay, and our aim is to continue increasing that figure so that our model will transform from all-free to all-paid," Joaquim Agut said.

ClickZ:It's Free (for a Fee): "Here's a Clue, not just for Steve Brill, but for everyone who creates content, both online and offline. We, the readers, don't care about you. We don't care about your problems, your balance sheet, or your costs. We care about us."

FastCompany: The Best Things in Life Are... Never Mind: "As sites begin to charge, this is the moment of truth for many Web companies. The sites that survive will be those that provide something so valuable that customers are willing to go to the trouble of keying in a credit card number to continue to access them."

Thanks to Bill Dimm for sending relevant articles.

Fewer wired homes as free ISPs vanish "The number of U.S. homes with Internet access dropped slightly during the first quarter of 2001, marking the first decrease in years, according to a survey released Tuesday."

PowerHomeBiz.com: Is the Web's Free Ride Over?: "Dot-coms, both big and small, have realized that giving away products and content for free is not a smart business model. Slowly but surely, online businesses are moving from free to fee-based subscription models. Is this the end of Internet's free days?"

Yahoo to charge for IM phone calls. Their alliance with Net2Phone to provide free internet phone calls has changed. "Calls placed through Messenger now cost 2 cents a minute domestically. International calls, new to the service, will vary in cost depending on the country."

Microsoft also has an arrangement with Net2Phone but in February found it neccessary to limit free calls using MSN Messenger to 5 minutes.

This is kinda old but Matt Goldberg of Automatic Media has some interesting things to say on Plastic about Salon's new subscription model and related issues: "Maybe it's just a question of unhealthy precedent, this widespread expectation that the function of the Internet is to act like some endlessly indulgent parent, to provide us with something for nothing. This inclination to confuse a gift economy with a license to be rude, all the while telling ourselves we're being smart consumers or that we're striking a blow against the media-industrial complex."

He also brings up the interesting point that charging for a no-advertising version of something, while having the ad-supported version remain free creates an interesting dilemma -- i.e., the most valuable (dedicated/frequent/serious and possibly more affluent and willing-to-spend-money) members of your audience are not available to your advertisers. Basically, you're likely to be selling them the less-engaged, the cheapskates, and the broke (a gross generalization, I realize, but...) -- not usually high on the target list. This is unlike mediums such as magazines or newspapers, which are either completely free and ad-supported, (rarely) completely subscription-supported, or (mostly commonly) supported by both ads and subscriptions -- advertisers always being more willing when they know audience has put money down and is, therefore, demonstrably more serious.

AP: Web sites going free-to-fee: "The pressure to charge Web surfers is the next logical step in a no-nonsense environment where online advertising revenue has dried up. These businesses must either show a profit or face extinction, dot.com entrepreneurs and analysts say."

Dialpad to stop free pc-to-phone calls, (in my inbox): "On May 15, 2001, Dialpad's basic service, which allows free unlimited pc-to-phone calls to the United States, will no longer be free and will become part of our dialpadworld service. You will still be able to enjoy unlimited free pc-to-pc calling from anywhere to anywhere in the world."

Profit Proving Pud's Catalog of Dot-Com Doom
Philip Kaplan is raking in $60,000 a month from subscriptions to F****d Company, a site that documents dot-com doom. Since starting the $25 and $75 subscription rates in March, Kaplan says he has "860 subscribers, paying an average of $63 a month."

TeamOn.com lays off about half its staff. TeamOn was one of those in the virtual-office/web-app/project management field. I believe they had recently announced the dicontinutation of their free version.

In an article from earlier this year, SiteSherpa.com went Around the Web in Zero Dollars to some of the remaining free photo, music, storage, and other sites.

"The real shame is that for every dot-com death (or at least every other one), we lose another opportunity to profit from the frantic giveaways that have dotted the web over the past few years. Unfortunately, when companies said they would offer free shipping for life, they meant their lives."

Betanews: MSN Offers Free Re-route.com Service to New Customers
"Re-route.com is currently available to users of any ISP for $25 for three months of forwarding. Users who switch to MSN, Telocity, or RCN will receive one free month of Re-route, but can get an extra three months of re-routing for $25."

I'm drifting off-topic, but why don't more people use a permanent address from a redirector such as Bigfoot? Probably because they don't know about the principle.

digitalMASS: Fee-based Web content is cropping up everywhere
"I don't think the model will be to take a vast organization like a big magazine and plunk it on the Web and try to get people to pay for it,'' Sullivan says. ''Something more modest may work, but to tell you the truth, none of us have a clue."

Lipstream a former provider of free voice chat services on the Excite portal is closed.
[link via f***edcompany]

AskTog: "The day of endless free stuff on the web is coming to a close. It may be replaced with a foolish economic model requiring endless and expensive subscriptions to services most people would rarely use. It may be built on a model that allows a whole lot of people to pay a tiny price for accessing those tiny pieces of information they actually need, either through micropayments or some sort of collective purchase system, a la AOL. If it is the former, the Web will grow slowly. If it is the latter, it will grow vigorously. Either way, it will grow."

The Not-So-Free Web
Hmm. For how long has Slashdot been about posting yesterday's NYT articles?

Hotpaper to stop free service
"[W]e will no longer offer the free access to Hotpaper's document template library and service that you have had in the past. This free service will be suspended as of June 25, 2001."

(Thanks to Tara Calishain and Chris Pirillo for some of the links I posted lately).

Wired News: E-Pledge Drives Don't Work
"Outing is now leaning toward a "shareware" model for content, with an up-front request for a contribution or fee. "I won't subject myself to the harassment I've gotten for trying to save something that I believed was valuable to its audience," he wrote to the OWL list members."

Free access to Merrill Lynch research closed
"AskMerrill International closed on April 30th. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Merrill Lynch clients, can access Merrill Lynch research online at our online service for clients, Merrill Lynch OnLine. This complimentary online client service offers access to research, account information, news and market data. If you are not yet enrolled in Merrill Lynch OnLine, please contact your financial consultant for assistance."

The service had been available through Multex for a limited, though undefined period. Well, now you know. You can re-subscribe for a 30-day free trial. It's not exactly clear to me what will happen at its end. Meanwhile, you can read Henry Blodget's controversed research notes in PDF format.

Namezero begins charging for email services. From their 'Final Disconnection Notice for Web & POP Access' email to users ...

'As mentioned in our e-mail last week, the Web and POP access for all Namezero FREE service domain e-mail will be discontinued by noon Pacific time on May 1, 2001. You will continue to have access to Namezero's domain-based e-mail forwarding service... If you want to continue to use Web or POP mail, you must upgrade to our PLUS service.'

Ferrari boss says F1 free until 2007
"Formula One is guaranteed to be on free-to-air television until at least the end of 2007, Ferrari sporting director Jean Todt said on Friday."

On TV too, what's free and what's not has far reaching consequences. The huge investments by automakers in Formula 1 would probably not make sense if Grands Prix were broadcasted only by pay-per-view, to a much smaller audience (most of you Americans might not care, but like with soccer, almost everyone else does!). If a majority of sites stop free services, what market will be left for ISPs or even PC makers? Mass-market broadband might pull demand, but someone has to provide applications on the other end.

The Age: 'Free' Internet access plummets
"The number of Australians enjoying free Internet access at home has plummeted, the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics report into the Internet usage has revealed."

NYT: Free Rides Now Passé on Information Highway
"Ed Bernstein, chief executive of PhotoPoint, said he had no choice. "The entire industry will have to move to a paid model or go away," he said. When the company raised $11 million from the likes of Intel, it predicted that half its revenue would come from advertising. It now calculates that it will be lucky if ads represent 10 percent of revenue. [...] Its costs, meanwhile, have been higher than anticipated. Sure, it costs only a few pennies a year to store a picture. But with 35 million pictures taking up 10 terabytes of disk space, those pennies add up."