The (slow) end of free diaries, online comics, and downloads?
Here's a well-researched contribution by our reader Ian Chipman:

First LiveJournal, and now Open Diary is no longer accepting new free
users, for a reason that's not too surprising (the ad revenue drops, of course). The OD+ paid service is $40 per year. But, it's strange how they won't accept more than 10,000 paying subscribers. Tell me, if you had a pay site, wouldn't you want as many paid members as humanly possible? The guys at Classmates and the Wall Street Journal, of course, have no qualms about too many paying users.

Moving on to a different online industry, we see that the free to fee transition to general audience (as opposed to porn) online comics is very slow, mainly because the online comics artists have been disputing over whether to charge subscriptions or micropayments. Some even insisted that their comics remain free as it is. Scott McCloud's "Reinventing Comics" plays a major role in this subscription/micropayment debate, it seems.

Only a few pay sites for these online comics have shown up. KeenSpot offers an ad-free version of their comics for $44.95 a year, Cool Beans World (which has always been a pay site) charges $29.95 a year and even offers content that goes beyond the online comics. A new site just opened called WowComics.com, which tries to experiment with pay online comics. However, it sells the comics on a "pay-per-view" rather than a subscription basis, using a proprietary viewer.

Moving on to the download industry, it looks like "No more free anime downloads," because many Web sites that used to offer (predominantly) anime and manga related downloadable software for free such as "KiSS dolls" and "Kamishibai stories" have been closing down for using up too much bandwidth, therefore overwhelming their Web hosts. These sites have gotten big traffic explosions since Otaku World, the largest site and almost the only one for these special downloads, became a paying subscription site in March last year. (many of Otaku users just went elsewhere looking for free downloads of similar files.)

The webmaster of Otaku World, Dov Sherman, recently posted a new "rant" about how he's constantly gotten so much hate mail for subscriptions and observed that the free web is dying. This webmaster says: "Please support the artists of Otaku World. Don't let the death of the free Internet mean the death of KiSS, Kamishibai, Otaku Mascot, and all the other things we all come to love."

Software download sites consume even higher amounts of bandwidth, whose costs might top falling advertising revenues. It seems as if it is becoming the end of free downloads. Walnut Creek CD-ROM's world famous ftp.cdrom.com site has drastically cut down on the number of files they have for download. GameSpy's FilePlanet has a subscription service called "Personal Server" for priority (faster) access to the downloads. Recently GameSpot set up a pay-only download service for $9.95 per month.