Yeah, throughout the internet things are often moving to different means of monetization. I'm curious how it works out. My thing is that for anything beyond a few bucks for a decently long membership, I don't know that I'd pay for it. But then again, while everything out there is free its easy to say that. Perhaps when every news source goes for a pay-to-play model though, I won't have that kind of choice.

I don't believe advertising will still be profitable, and this NPR story really does point out that the advertising model simply isn't as lucrative as subscription fees, at least at the level of the NY Times. Not to mention that these days, even not-too-tech-savvy people have access to a fully-featured and easy to use adblocker in most mainstream browsers. And perhaps a pay model will be better by not having to base "Success" around pageviews. It might improve the quality of the work. Still, I'm not fond of having to pay for good content, because I still get good content for free right now. Who knows what kinds of cool new ways creators will be able to sustain themselves in the future though?