Bye bye ad driven model, hello paygo

As predicted long ago, the world will move away from ad driven "free" online services and go to a paygo model.  The reason is simple: liberals want anything they can get for free, but conservatives are willing to pay if something has value.  Thus, financial times and many other online news sources that used to be free now require a subscription.

It seems the latest to join this new wave is yahoo finance.  You used to be able to look at company statistics, etc. for free.  But now its no longer free, in fact, it really isn't even very cheap.  The "discount price" is now $35 per month.  This represents a major change in Yahoo finance.  And even though I am an active market gambler, I will not pay this.  So Yahoo is going to get a wake up call here.  For $35 / month (much less their fake $50/month MSRP) I expect original content, not content that is aggregated from other sources on the web.  And Yahoo finance statistics were never much for being up to date. IF their bot got lucky then the data would be useful as a quick sniff but for those who thought they had to have good data, a better and much more up to date source would be nasdaq.com.

But the bottom line is that the internet is about to go paygo just like I have long predicted would be the case.