Poll: Pay for Castanet?

September 1st is a new fiscal year for many businesses, including Castanet. Most businesses go through and take a long hard look at the past year and budget for the year ahead. We are going through this now at Castanet.

The online advertising business is a challenging one. It was only this year that the world wide online advertising business surpassed its previous highs of the dot.com boom before the dot.com bust.

Castanet has grown remarkably since its start in November 2000. While our average main page visits was about 22,000 per day this time last year, we now regularly break 40,000 per day. It seems that more readers than ever are using us as their home page and are responding to our new constantly updated format that we launched back in March.

It’s with all this in mind we ask you today’s poll question.

In order for Castanet to continue operating, would you be willing to pay an annual $60 subscription fee? $60 per year translates to $5.00 / month.

Non-subscribers would only be able to access the main page and not the news content that drives the bulk of the visits to our site. The paid for content and rest of the site would largely remain the same.

Charging for online content is increasingly being used by online content providers to mitigate ongoing operating losses.