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As the Internet continues to expand, there seems to be a growing trend of new online businesses offering traditionally paid for services at no charge. The model isn't a new one but its application to online business is proving to be successful time after time.

The model consists of offering a free service and collecting revenue from advertising. Advertising driven programming has worked for years on radio and television and It's working quite well for Internet companies such as Dialpad.com which offers free long distance calls and FaxForFree.com that lets you send faxes anywhere at no charge. Users of these services see banner ads while accessing the web site. Clicking on an ad usually sends the surfer to that advertiser's web page or displays relevant product information.

Another such service to join the ranks of offering a free traditionally paid for service is TotallyFreePaging.com. Their name says it all. Most pager subscribers pay monthly fees ranging from $15 to $25 a month. And depending on the pager service, subscribers may pay on a per page basis when sending text to an alpha-numeric pager. One of the most costly parts of running pager business is employing live operators to transcribe text messages. TotallyFreePaging avoids that expense by allowing Internet users to type in a user's number or name on their web site and then up to a 200 character message. The message is delivered in moments. Users may also call a local or toll-free number to send a numeric page as well, again for free. That's because in addition to seeing an ad banner on TotallyFreePaging's web site, subscribers also see a small ad on their pager. But with thousands already subscribing to TotallyFreePaging's service, it seems that most don't find the ads any more intrusive than seeing an ad during a commercial break on television.

In addition to paging, TotallyFreePaging will be adding additional free services such as letting subscribers configure their account to deliver other information of interest. These include specific stock quotes, calendar reminders, sport scores and news. You'll even be able to set alarms on your stock portfolio so if a particular stock falls below a certain point, you get a page.

Currently, you have three choices on obtaining the alpha-numeric pager. You can buy one directly from TotallyFreePaging. You can trade in your current model and get a $20 rebate on their pager. Or you can send in your alpha-numeric pager and TotallyFreePaging will modify it to work with their service for $10 plus an activation fee of $25. See their web site for more details on pricing.

Some final observations about all of this. Television seems to be the reverse of the "free service we used to have to pay for" Internet model. TV is now a "pay for something we used to get for free" paradigm. You can still get free TV with an antenna but more and more subscribe to cable or satellite because we want hundreds of channels and pay-per-view options. Technically that kind of programming was never for free but the medium on which we view it started out that way. As for radio, the Internet has amplified that business model through services such as YahooBroadcast.com that vastly increase a local station's reach and listening audience to a potentially global scale.

Bottom line is that the Internet is truly diverse when it comes to business. It creates, changes and even amplifies existing models in ways never before possible. I can't wait to see what's next.

www.dialpad.com
www.fax4free.com
www.totallyfreepaging.com