"And, I think we can assume that subscription models aren't going to scale well." I'd be careful making that assumption. There are at least two large, well kn

"And, I think we can assume that subscription models aren't going to scale well." I'd be careful making that assumption. There are at least two large, well known magazines that are purely subscription based and doing pretty well (Cook's Illustrated and Consumer Reports). People value their content enough to pay for it, regardless of the delivery mechanism. Their costs are going to decrease substantially as customer preference moves to online delivery, too. There's a great deal of content out there people will pay for and the floundering large publishing companies are responsible for a huge chunk of it. Their problem is, however, that they've attempted to move print style business models directly to the web. Delivering something at marginal cost (effectively 0 on the intertubes) while incurring massive fixed costs and counting on ads for revenue hasn't and isn't going to play out so well when advertisers don't value the audience and medium like they do for print. ESPN has one of the more interesting models out there. They've done a really good job offering premium paid content in addition to their free web based stuff. I think you'll see other online publishers do something similar, with varying levels of success.