This just into my inbox, an email offering me the premium side of High Beam's research set - bringing down the subscription price to $74.95/year or $14.95/month. That's getting down to Wall Street Journal levels and is in the same neck of the woods as Factiva's initial subscription fee. Factiva goes $69 for an annual subscription fee, $9.95 monthly fee per track folder, and $2.95 per article viewed. Getting individuals to "yes" is a key factor in content ecommerce, and using low initial subscription thresholds is an important element towards that goal. But even with this, straight subscribe/purchase models are going to have an increasingly hard time competing against models that include contextual content monetization capabilities that make it easier for content providers to price content in proportion to its true, contextual, real-time market value. Notably both HighBeam and Factiva shy away from the Moreover or a9 approach of using one search to provide both open Web and premium aggregation results, in part because of the limits (or from their perspective, the strengths) of their search technologies and in part because of the latent mindsets of "old aggregation" players who are still convinced that open Web content is inferior because it's not properly sanitized through taxonomies and metadata. There are no "magic bullets" for this merging - both Moreover and a9 have notable limitations in their approaches - but in the New Aggregation the data sets that provide vContent value can come from anywhere at any time, with or without the usual aggregator licensing agreements, to help people solve specific problems.