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End of the Free Internet

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the where-the-sidewalk-ends dept.

efedora writes: "The End of Free keeps a list of the various transitions to paid services from free net sites. The list is getting longer. When I think of an individual site that's really worthwhile I say to myself, "Sure, that site is worth $4.95 a month". The problem is there are going to be lots of sites at $$$ a month and it sure adds up." Of course even Slashdot is planning on rolling out subscriptions-for-no-banner-ads sometime soon, so I suppose we're not entirely immune to the subscription bug either.

2 of 481 comments (clear)

  1. Re:subscriptions for non-banner-ads by DrSkwid · · Score: 5, Informative

    Run a webserver on your local machine.

    and put

    <script>
    window.close()
    </script>

    in the error page associated with 127.0.0.1

    --
    There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
  2. Re:subscriptions for non-banner-ads by Tackhead · · Score: 5, Informative
    > There's more ads than information, now.

    No shit. For good laughs, cut-and-paste the text of a news article into a text editor, then save the HTML and compare the difference.

    I believe the current record for lowest S/N ratio (ignoring tomshardware.com's practice of putting one sentence per page ;-) for a mainstream news site is http://www.theglobeandmail.com.

    Ad-laden CNN serves 22,700 bytes of HTML for a 1400-byte story.

    The Globe and Mail delivers a staggering 90,587 bytes of HTML for a 3082-byte story.

    Those numbers are for surfers who surf with images off, by the way. The bloat is Javashit, banners, towers, stock quotes, polls, and navigation to every section of the newspaper. I don't even want to think about what it'd be like with graphics on.

    And these jerkwads wonder why their bandwidth bills are so high.