In the last year, the Wall Street Journal's web site - one of the few news sites still requiring a paid subscription - has nearly doubled its user-base, with a 94% increase since June 2007. The site now reaches 16.2 million users.

While many sites requiring subscriptions flounder -- just last week, the Irish Times dropped their subscription-based platform, relaunching as a free site, and earlier this year the Atlantic Monthly also dropped their online paywall -- the Wall Street Journal has been uncommonly successful.

The site offers a mix of free and paid content. The Journal's breaking-news alerts and personal-finance, opinion and lifestyle content, as well as videos, blogs, podcasts and other interactive elements are all available free.

Even with a fee - print subscribers pay $49 a year for a web subscription - WSJ Online attracts more than one million subscribers and 10 million monthly unique visitors.

In 2007, WSJ.com generated about $60 million in subscription revenue. To put this in perspective, making up that revenue in ad sales would require WSJ.com to increase traffic by more than 20 million unique monthly visitors.

Sources: Media Week, The Wall Street Journal