When we are talking about tutorials and training though, that’s the choice of whoever does them. Sometimes the idea that they are free, might make people think they are not good and that is not always true, of course.

But there’s competition. If your neighbour site is presenting entire courses for free about the same thing you are selling training for, who will get the most traffic? The free site with ads or the one with the paid subscription? And on the net, your neighbour might live hours away.

Being a child of the television age, I am sometimes irritated by ads but have accepted them as the necessary evil that they are. The best sites I visit have ads but only oblige me to tolerate them; I’m not expected to like them. Publish.com is a good example. I get a lot of great information from them on a constant basis, and the ads are there but aren’t trying to reach out and strangle me.

When it gets too much is when the sites that use ads use thier content as an excuse to foist ads upon me. Popunders, “view this flash ad”, things like that (fortunately, being a dialup user, I can click past those sorts of ads before they load. One of the few pluses of dialup, actually).

Since my income is not yet in the ascendant, making me pay for what I already came to expect free, whether or not it’s a logical evolution, only pushes me and many like me from marginal haves to complete have-nots.