Delicious - is this the end of free?

It looks pretty certain that Yahoo! will be shutting down its social bookmarking service Delicious in the next few months.  Although a few million people (myself included) use it regularly, Delicious generates no direct income for Yahoo! There are alternatives - see TechRadar for some suggestions - but the closest match to Delicious seems to be Pinboard which charges from $8 to use the service.  I've just signed up to Pinboard and it looks good - certainly very fast.  

Does this mark the beginning of a new phase of web services?  I guess Facebook and some of the other big social networks have enough scale to keep their offerings free to users through the selling of advertising.  However, those without this scale may take a lesson from Yahoo! and either shut down loss-making services or start charging.  Ning did this recently.  The Freemium model (no charge for a basic level of service and subscriptions for added service levels) has attracted much attention over the last several years but Pinboard and Ning only offer paid subscriptions.  It will be interesting to see how this strategy works for them.  If subscriptions do become more generally accepted amongst web users I can see an opportunity for a new business- bundling.  I have about 6 monthly subscriptions to various online services and would welcome a way of amalgamating them into a single payment, particularly if there was a way to add and remove services easily to the bundle and maybe get some discounts from the bundler/service providers for multiple subscriptions.  Just a thought.

Making money from free information

Making money by selling digital information is becoming increasingly difficult as end users increasingly rely on free sources for their personal or business needs.  2 recent posts from the Alacra blog (links at bottom of this post) are fascinating and offer an insight into how the company has developed a commercial (based on a "freemium" model) information service that combines the knowledge of selected financial bloggers with their own proprietary databases of companies and M&A activity.  I was particularly interested in the comment by Steven Goldstein of Alacra regarding the need to use both automated systems to create a scalable system and human editors to compensate for inaccuracies in their semantic tagging system:

" Finally, we rely upon human review of the results. While technology is critical, in that it allows the product to scale, technology alone will only reach accuracy levels of 80-85%. That may be sufficient for some products, but when we’re pushing out alerts to users, we believe the bar is higher. So, we have a 24-hour team of editors who review the tagged events to ensure they are accurate."

http://www.alacrablog.com/alacrablog/2009/11/the-alacra-knowledge-base-a-rose-by-any-other-name.html

http://www.alacrablog.com/alacrablog/2009/11/tagging-the-heartbeat-of-alacra-pulse.html