I thought I would reply to this as it touches on my experience very directly. esl-lounge has been on the web since 2000 and I have been through it all. 90% of our site is still free and it will always remain so. But with hosting expenses as well as those "time" expenses, which are never put into these equations, I had to monetize the site from 2004/2005.
Back then I was eating through over 100gb in traffic every single month and spending around $1000 in hosting fees annually. Why? Because I happen to use the Rolls Royce of hosting companies (FutureQuest) who not only provide 99.9% uptime guarantee but have never taken more than 10 minutes to reply to a support query...even when it's 4am in Florida, where they're based. But that standard of hosting comes at a cost. I have other less mission-critical sites hosted elsewhere for a third of the price, but for my ESL site, I would never have made the decision to go to a cheap host and save $500 like that. So I had to find that money.
I made the decision to open a "premium" site last September and it has been an enormous success. It's true, I have also seen plenty of "pay sites" done badly and then return to the free fold, tail between their legs. My pay site is going from strength to strength and we are about to start print advertising around the world.
I think the reason for its success is because I decided: if I'm going to make people pay, it has to be for a higher quality product, not just the freebie worksheets that are on my free site. So that's what we have. I won't turn this post into an advert - I just wanted to give the view from where I stand.
I believe the ESL world is big and ugly enough to support all types of sites: job sites, freebie worksheets, podcasts, big forums and a few pay-for-quality sites too.
I started teaching in 1993 and I can tell you, if the internet had existed then.....(OK, I'll stop there!
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