• GigaOm, Thursday, July 8, 2010 12:54 PM

Are bloggers giving up on the promise of ad-supported autonomy? Suggesting as much, GigaOm -- which offers its own subscription-based services -- points to a growing number of media pioneers who are scrapping their ad-supported blogs for subscription-based email newsletters. Most recently, Sam Lessin, founder of streaming-media startup Drop.io, said he was shutting down his blog and starting a subscription newsletter.

Sensing a trend, Lessin also started his own subscription-newsletter service named Letter.ly. Letter.ly is designed to allow newsletter writers to set their own price for subscriptions, and the Drop.io founder's blog is $1.99 a month. In part, Lessin attributes a decline in blogging to the rise of Twitter and Facebook, which lead to what he calls "passive and active data-streams." What's more, in Lessin's opinion, writing a public blog that was available for free to readers was "exceedingly disingenuous if not straight hypocritical given my strong belief in the value of information."

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