Mental block

Delicious

indeed my dear panko, however this assumes that the service will become *so* essential to users that they will keep on using it even if some kind of payment is required. Also, these services have to address the issue of having a two-tiered audience, one tier that is smaller and uses the full range of services by paying, and the majority, which provides the critical mass yet free-rides in a sense. Getting the optimal mix is essential.

Furthermore I believe that perhaps advertising and other, more indirect ways of payment will be used as revenue sources rather than subscriptions. Even the New York Times had to recently open its floodgates and stop charging a fee for premium services because simply it didn't work...

Let's make some money :)

Let's face it. People do NOT want to pay for services. They never did. Even when it's optional, very few people need the urge to "donate" something because a service really did what they wanted it to do.

So the rule of thumb is, you don't ever demand payments from your visitors. They get to keep their money, but you have to make some. How?

First thing that comes to mind is online advertising.

But online advertising has, itself, a big side-effect. Most customers don't want to pay per impression but per click.  After all, it was like that even before Google AdWords. So, you've set up a voluntary payment system again. Few of your visitors will actually click on your ads. It's definitely more effective than the donation thingy, but won't always work. (Especially if you're providing some sort of information in RSS format, then your online ad thingy will be dead before you know it).

So let's examine the situation again:

- Users do want to use your services.

- Users don't want to have to pay expensive monthly subscriptions to do so.

- Users don't want to be tied up with your service because tomorrow there may be a better one around.

Here is the point, IMHO, where micropayments get in the game. 24-subscriptions via SMS or even credit card, or per-service instance payments.

I think that there is much room for payed services, as long as the pricing is right. I don't agree with cap's comment. Users realize that high availability, SLAs, really large storage space, etc. cost money.

I'm paying for a VPS hosting environment for my blog (and my experiments) despite the existence of free blogging platforms, I pay for Amazon S3 storage for my podcasts etc. If my GMail mailbox gets too big, I'll pay for extra storage too. The cost is acceptable for me and I don't have the limitations of the free equivalents.

Bare in mind, however, that the Long Tail theory implies more than the "extension" of the tail. It also states that the curve is shifted (ex. not only fewer "hits", but "smaller" too).