Online news sites benefit from type-in traffic and links from sites like Yahoo, Google, and the Drudge Report. Once sites require subscriptions, those links will disappear, along with the resulting traffic. What they’ll be left with is a small group of loyal readers willing to pay a reasonable fee for news that they could readily read at one of several free web sites. Let’s also remember that those links provided by news aggregators brought in visitors who clicked ads. When the traffic goes down, the ad revenue will probably follow. After all, do you want to advertise on a site that isn’t viewed much in comparison to its peers?

If you think a subscription model makes sense, and is the wave of the future, I have a scenario for you. What if every news site in the world charged, except one. That site would see a rapid increase in readership, increased ad revenue, and would have lots of interesting ways to monetize their content. The subscription sites? They would probably slowly die one-by-one, until they smartened up and moved back to a free format. Sure it’s a simple example, but it illustrates an important point: As long as there is one free source, readers will flock to it.