The trend of charging subscription fee for value-added content continues with Ars Technica. It’s interesting to see in this case that Ars is attempting to charge a pretty hefty fee by online content standards ($50/year) in exchange for a large array of content, benefits, and subscription-only services.

As respected online publications such as Salon.com, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal removed all or most of their paid subscription models over the course of the decade, conventional wisdom formed that holding print content intended for a mainstream audience behind a pay wall was a noble but failed experiment.

But are paid subscriptions on the Internet poised to make a comeback, albeit in a different form?

There are several standard ways to make money in the highly competitive online publishing space. The dominant one for years has been free content supported by advertising, but the massive amount of supply (even of the high-quality stuff) coupled with a worldwide recession have pushed down rates that advertisers are willing to pay for ad space, squeezing profit margins for most online publishers.

TechCrunch’s MG Siegler points out a not-so-little secret about online display ads: most people couldn’t care less about them:

The web is increasingly filling up with ads. Many sites, including this one, have a bunch of them all around with the hopes that you’ll find one relevant to you, and click on it. Of course, most of you don’t. And if you do, it may be by accident.

While there are a number of other ways to make money at the online content game, such as using content to sell products and services, there are a few factors at play that could pave the way for online paid subscriptions to make major headway over the next few years.

(read the rest of this piece at Web Worker Daily)

The network model seems to be a smarter play these days: roll out a bunch of sites, each of which is specifically designed to attract some niche or piece of the fragmented marketplace – and see which ones “stick.” And FunnyOrDie.com, an edgy-ish comedy site that is part of Or Die Networks, has done pretty well as the centerpiece of a network of sites based on the “or die” brand. ShredOrDie.com for instance, a skateboarding and extreme sports site backed by legend Tony Hawk, seems to have as good a shot at gaining traction in the crowded original content space as anyone else.

FunnyOrDie.com made a big splash thanks to the help of comic actor Will Ferrell, whose video short called The Landlord is already a modern Internet legend, racking up some 58 million views and counting. So attaching celebrities to original video content and aiming it at niche audiences seems to be a pretty reasonable starting place for future success in 2008.

But the trick with celebrities and producing original content is that they’re expensive. Today we learn that one of the ODN sites, BlueCollarOrDie.com, is shutting down in part due to the expense of keeping the new content rolling. Of course, the kind of content that Blue Collar emphasized – down home comedians such as Jeff Foxworthy, Larry the Cable Guy, Ron White and Bill Engvall – may not have been perfect for the Internet or the ODN brand.

But my overall takeaway is that the network model works in that you roll out a bunch of sites and see which ones succeed. Inevitably if sadly you shut down the ones that aren’t doing as well. It’s the Internet content business as magazine business, and it makes a lot of sense. The challenge for video-based networks like ODN is to figure out how to get the cost of producing original video in line with making money from video ads, sponsorships, and traditional banner advertising.