Ad Age: Assessing Time Warner's Subscribers-Only Online Strategy

When Time Warner very suddenly pulled all the content from its magazine empire from the free Internet, most analysts presumed this was in order to help jumpstart new AOL subscriptions, one of the paid places where the magazine content was available. But even as the AOL strategy - if it ever was the primary strategy - clearly did not work, the magazines themselves are finding significant revenue in individual subscriptions.

With large media companies like Time Warner and Hearst now taking the free content out of the market, other magazines are now finding it much easier to charge for their content. Where Internet technology companies suffered through impossible revenue conditions up until 2001 because of VC-funded competition gave away similar services for free, the content side of the Internet suffered a similar fate until only very recently.