LONDON (Brand Republic) - The move to websites charging for premium online content is picking up pace as Yahoo! begins charging a monthly fee of $9.95 (£6.99) for an online stock-quote service.
The service -- which will be available to subscribers throughout the Yahoo! global network -- offers news, analysis and real-time quotes from the American, New York and Nasdaq stock exchanges.
The news comes as Yahoo! continues to look for revenue streams that do not rely on advertising revenue alone. The finance channel already has two fee-based services, one for paying bills and one for filing tax returns. Analysts believe that the company is introducing new fee-based services rather than charging for existing ones, because internet users are traditionally reluctant to pay for content.
Yahoo鈥檚 move follows a growing number of online content providers that introduced subscription-based services, as advertising fails to provide sufficient revenue to survive. Online magazine Salon.com will begin charging this month for an 鈥渁d-free鈥 premium service, and Microsoft鈥檚 portal MSN is understood to be considering introducing charges for extra services.
Encyclopaedia company Britannica.com is launching a fee-based service for schools in the summer and is looking at similar services for consumers.
Some companies have been charging for online content for some time. The French newspaper Le Monde, for example, has been charging an average of FF21 (£1.99) for archived online news stories since 1998, and claims to sell more than 2,000 articles a day. The New York Times website is another that charges for micro-payment access to its archives.
But even those that have successfully introduced subscription charges, such as the Wall Street Journal, have still found it hard going. The Journal last week announced that it would be making cost-saving cuts at its online operation.
www.yahoo.com
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