Fee Fatigue

After I started this blog, I finally caved and paid Microsoft an annual fee ($19.95) to provide me with more storage space for my Hotmail account. I'm thinking about paying Major League Baseball a fee of $15 for audio streams of all MLB radio broadcasts. I already pay the Wall Street Journal an annual fee of $40 to access their site(s). As I scan my junk mail, any number of service providers are lining up to offer me on-line fee-based services, most of which I neither want nor need.

The ever excellent Thomas Weber has a good column about this in today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required!). I suspect he's right that "fee fatigue" will be the next malaise of the on-line world, as companies struggle to figure out how to make their web offerings pay.