ESPN.com's Insider charges for links to free sites: says their subscription page: "ESPN Insider delivers the premier editorial content in the game. Insider brings you tomorrow's news today with a treasure trove of inside information, cutting edge analysis and the most comprehensive daily link service on the net."

This kind of practice is not new. I'm not sure people are ready to pay for presurfing (when we asked, we got zero feedback), but here ESPN also throws in a database and statistics that might be time consuming for people to gather and manage by themselves.