No more free rides for some Web site services
By John Yaukey
Gannett News Service
| • | Finding freebies
There are still plenty of freebies out there: mouse pads, food samples, cologne, phone cards — you just have to know where to look. Visit (www.totallyfreestuff.com) for free content, e-mail service and product samples. from all over the Web. Also check out: |
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Later is now.
In the past year, Web sites ailing from the dot-com flameout, sagging online advertising revenues and jittery stockholders have begun charging
en masse for some of the content they had been doling out free. The movement cuts across all digital strata, from media, gaming and search sites that have added content and usage fees to some of the Web's biggest portals such as Yahoo! that have started aggressively marketing paid services.
By all accounts, this is only going to continue as more content providers decide they simply can't continue to give away the store.
This is not to say that advertising-supported free content will vanish altogether. Rather, consumers will see it increasingly coexist with paid services, often as a tease. Magazines, for example, often put article summaries on their free sites as an inducement to pay for the unabbreviated versions.
"Many sites are now trying to figure out that delicate balance between paid and free content,'' said Denise Garcia, who analyzes online content for the Gartner marketing research firm. "This is new territory for many, and it's the only hope for some.''
The sea change at hand has not come as a sudden flood but rather as a slow creep — perhaps just slow enough so Netizens aren't up in arms — at least not conspicuously.
"It's a nickel-and-dime progression,'' said Virginia resident Alan Katzen. "Nothing shocking or dramatic. But you suddenly realize you don't have access to the same stuff you once did.''
Sites and pricing
The list of sites now charging for once free content and services reads like a digital Who's Who, with pricing models that run the gamut from monthly fees to single-use charges.
If there's any good news here it's that in many cases paying a few bucks a month will spare you a fusillade of ads.
Yahoo!'s GeoCities (geocities.com), still offers a free Web hosting service, but it has added two new paid publishing plans — a $5-per-month option that provides 25 megabytes of storage, plus a $20-per-month plan that quadruples the storage — as part of a strategy to nudge freeloaders to pay.
The new plans, along with existing $9 and $12 options, remove the ads that typically clutter free GeoCities pages.
The $5 plan is similar to offers introduced in December by Web site hosters Tripod (www.tripod.com) and Angelfire (www.angelfire.com). Meanwhile, home-page builder Homestead.com has eliminated its free pages entirely with its cheapest ad-free hosting option running $49 a year.
Searching, one of the most popular online activities, is also going the paid route — at least for premium content.
Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com) has launched a fee-based premium search feature that will provide customers with access to reference reports, news and other content. The Premium Document Search service allows users to search a library of more than 70 million pages from more than 7,100 newspapers, trade journals and other sources. The search engine will charge $ 4.95 a month for 50 documents, or a per-article fee of between $1 and $4.
Media sites, historically among the staunchest proponents of free content if only because they failed repeatedly to find a successful paid-content model, are now starting to charge for their online products.
In a recent speech, Chris Cramer, the president of CNN International (www.cnn.com), said he believes that most news sites will soon begin charging fees because advertising revenues alone can't keep Internet news operations solvent.
"A lot of what you're seeing now is not so much a failure of advertising, but a realignment of the expectations people had for it,'' said Gartner's Garcia. "And that's going to have inevitable effects for consumers.''
CNN is removing free video clips from its news, sports and financial sites following ABC's lead in that direction. CNN is charging $4.95 per month or $39.95 per year for unlimited access to video feeds while ABC is charging $9.95 a month for its SuperPass service.
Newspapers — the vast majority of which are still all free online — are also experimenting with paid online subscriptions. The Tulsa World (www.tulsaworld.com), an Oklahoma daily, says nearly 3,000 people have signed up for its $45-a-year Web subscription.
Tech news site CNET.com reportedly plans to start charging soon for some of its e-mail newsletters and Web games.
Tech news and discussion Web site Slashdot (www.slashdot.com), which touts itself as "news for nerds,'' is charging $5 for every 1,000 pages it displays without ads.
Once free wireless services are feeling the pinch as well.
Vindigo (www.vindigo.com), which provides city guides for PDAs is launching a subscription plan to replace its free service, which had been supported by advertisers. The new service runs $24.95 a year.
Of course, one of the biggest stories in paid content has been online music.
AOL (www.aol.com), MSN (www.msn.com) and Yahoo! now offer new Internet music subscription services, MusicNet and PressPlay, with monthly prices ranging from $10 to $25.
Even streaming media — still regarded by many as not ready for prime time — is attracting viewers willing to pay. Half a million people pay $10 a month to watch streamed sports, news and other content through RealNetworks' RealOne SuperPass service (www.realone.com).
"The key is to have content nobody else has — and we have that,'' said Real's Lisa Amore.
SuperPass, for example, offers subscribers the opportunity to tune in live to audio feeds from top NASCAR drivers as they're communicating with their pit crews during races.
Remaining freebies
Despite the massive changes afoot, there's still plenty of free content on the Web.
You're just going to have to search a little harder for it.
For starters:
News. There's still plenty of free news on the Web. Try USA TODAY (www.usatoday.com), The New York Times (www.nyt.com) or The Washington Post (www.washingtonpost.com) for a still generous free serving of national and international news. Some of these sites require a subscription, but that's just a matter of signing up.
MSNBC (www.msnbc.com/news), one of the most popular news sites on the Web, meanwhile, has said it's committed to developing news video online for free.
Financial information. Financial Web sites such as TheStreet.com, CNBC (moneycentral.msn.com/investor/home.asp) and Morningstar.com (www.morningstar.com) still provide plenty of free information such as stock quotes and analyst perspectives.
Music. BearShare (www.bearshare.com) lets you search for, download, and share music files with everyone on the global Gnutella peer-to-peer information network. This program works with .mp3, .mpeg, .avi, .asf, .mov, .jpeg, .gif, and all other file types.
The KaZaa Media Desktop (www.kazaa.com) is a peer-to-peer file-sharing service that lets you search and download music files from other KaZaa users. Gnutella (www.gnutella.com) does the same.
MSN Music (www.music.msn.com) offers a wide selection of free Internet radio stations.
