Yeah Interet is become very expensive these days pending what your plan is. If your a dial-up user, you have to pay for ISP AND phonebill. With the addition of this "pay-per site" system in the air, this could as well make it in the cost for having internet. I mean haven\'t we already paid too much for internet already? If you think high speed bandwidth saves money, think again. In some places, it costs nearly $50 USD to have cable OR dsl, and the flavors of it can sky rocket it easily. Yeah I think $29.99 a month for my 10mbit line is reasonable, but for the many sites I visit, and the numerous banners I click every visit and I\'m asked to pay for a site, I think its un-fair.
You can thank the big .com and E-commerce sites (yahoo, excite, etc etc) for bringing things down. Just look at the stock market now, Yahoo\'s stock (YHOO) was worth $169 per share not that long ago (7 months). Now its worth a measly $17.69 PER SHARE! Call it psyhotic, that\'s a lot of money!! Perhaps the technology industry is responsible for the downstream of the net industry, I mean just look at these companies who supply ram, CPU\'s, video cards all selling at dirt cheap prices. And its because of their ads that generate money for the sites on internet based around games, entertainment, technology.
We all know the gaming networks weren\'t going in the right direction when the susposevly huge network that hosted us for a long time, Gamfan Network, did not pay a site called SomethingAwful for 4 straight months, thus driving the controversey of suspecting GameFan wasn\'t able to pay its sites for a given reason(s). Sure enough the news came through in October when its owner, Express.com had punished GameFan for poor management and all sites were promised pay, but of course people like Bjorn never recieved 1 cent.
This isn\'t the only network that was expirencing troubles. The giant gamers.com network, established by the very successful Quake player, Dennis "Thresh" Fong, never updated its site for a long time and not paying its site. Again 1 month later a massive mail sent to its site(s) about it closing down.
Dissapointing indeed. Don\'t get Bjorn wrong, he sure isn\'t in it for the money only, he enjoys doing what he does but for a student needs some cash. I know right now he\'s working extremly hard to get school finished and finding a well paying job that hopefully will still power his very powerful sites that have owned the search engines. Because he loves running sites such as this since its such a blast having your content being viewed by thousands of visitors a day.
jm