Rising from the dead: The paid-for online model

In a guest post to Dan Farber’s cnet blog, Frédéric Filloux makes a compelling case for the emergence of hybrid forms of financial support for online content:

Death reports of paid-for models on the Internet have been greatly exaggerated. Granted: the network's genome carries the "free" nucleotide. As in both freedom and free goods and services. Like it or not, its publicly funded origins (universities and the Pentagon) led to the emergence of widely adopted services such as search engines or Wikipedia. In turn, these have sealed the fate of the paid-for model as the dominant one. Right. I intentionally emphasize dominant. Because like everywhere else, hybrid forms are likely to emerge.

Link: Outside the Lines.  --Dennis