Maybe surfers are ready to pay: "AOL currently has a smattering of for-pay services, including games which cost 99 cents to $1.99 an hour to play online. AOL Phone and AOL Mobile Communicator have a monthly fee. But the revenue from those features is negligible and AOL executives have publicly acknowledged the importance of launching other premium services. Pittman gave radio veteran Jimmy de Castro, president of the online unit, the goal of developing and packaging premium music services to sell to AOL members."

Link sent by Gary Price. There's a current wave of articles that wake up to the fact there's no evil curse on the Internet that would prevent it to be a means to sell content and services. The open questions are switching to "what's working and what's not" instead of "can this even work at all?"

Some people think of TheEndOfFree as another finger-pointing site (I won't finger point myself, but you know who I'm thinking of) focused on chronicling the demise of the free web. We're not, and if we come accross as one, we're failing at what we wanted to be from the beginning (keyword: self-sustaining). We're just telling the news as they're happening. With the many online paying services that started in the last 18 months, the dust is going to settle a little bit. Expect more reports of best/worst practices, and a little less "Company X e-mailed its users their free service would stop by the middle of next month."