You don't consider my $5 per month to Supernews to be a good monetization model? ;-) The clear need that the OP is trying to address suggests that Usenet migh

You don't consider my $5 per month to Supernews to be a good monetization model? ;-) The clear need that the OP is trying to address suggests that Usenet might be monetizable now. Many web sites aren't going to want to store large amounts of historical text from their user forums. Perhaps there is a market for hosting forums using NNTP under the covers. Each site could provide a default web interface but also allow access via the users' preferred news readers. Decoupling the GUI from the service is good practice in any case.