Sunday, April 07, 2002

WSJ.com: New Flood of For-Fee Web Services May Find Few Willing Customers"If you want to listen to a baseball game, you could use an AM radio and tune in for free. Or you could fire up your PC and hear an Internet "stream" of the same broadcast -- after forking over $14.95 for a Gameday Audio season pass at Major League Baseball's Web site... That's not the only price tag you'll bump into online these days. CNN.com now wants $4.95 a month for blurry video clips of President Bush's news conferences and other feeds, while Monster.com asks $6.65 a month for fancy résumé typefaces. Fees are popping up everywhere, from sophisticated financial services to greeting-card sites ... The long-term answer to that problem might be a universal ID system like Microsoft's Passport, or even some sort of automatically deducted micropayment. Yet no matter what approach sites take, it will pay to keep in mind that the tollbooth Web gives consumers new power: the ability to vote with their pocketbooks."

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