Just a few years ago, as dot-com companies started to tank, many analysts had predicted that some free Web content and tools would disappear or dwindle. But "free is certainly making a huge comeback these last 12 to 18 months," says Olivier Travers, a technology consultant in the U.K.

 

The sustained rebound in Internet advertising has played a big role in the continued free-for-all.

 

Today, free content is often mixed with paid content in some way. For instance, the link to this story is free, part of the Journal's effort to draw in new readers by offering a public link that might get a lot of blog play. The Journal is about to be joined in the Dow Jones family by CBS Marketwatch, a mostly free service that also sells subscriptions to newsletters and data.
Some people believe strongly that all of it should be free; others are still into putting up walls. It doesn't have to be either or and, in many cases, it shouldn't be. Exclusive clubs create buzz. Exclusive sites don't. There's nothing wrong with mixing free content -- which of course isn't free to produce -- and some premium content available only to subscribers.

 

While no single company is responsible for so much of the Web remaining free, Google has played a powerful role.

The Mountain View, Calif., company has, in a matter of just six years, reached $1.35 billion in first-half revenue and $143 million in net income, almost entirely by getting advertisers to pay to reach its user base. As Google has grown, it has picked up other tech companies along the way and made their paid products free. In July, it bought Picasa and turned the company's photograph-organizing software free. "The first thing Google does after each and every one of its acquisitions is turn a fee service off and make it free,"

Google's free tech tools and others' have enabled ordinary Web denizens to create their own free content. Last year the company bought Pyra Labs, which makes software to publish frequently updated Web sites with links and commentary, and made the company's Blogger software free. These tools and others have sparked a proliferation of new free content online, like political blogs and Wikipedia, the popular encyclopedia maintained by thousands of users.

At Google, "the ethos is definitely as big as possible, as mainstream as possible, and that definitely means free," says Evan Williams, co-founder of Pyra Labs.