Topica Users Pay the Piper

Some Topica subscribers are up in arms after the leading provider of free e-mail discussion lists started inserting spam-like ads last week at the top of messages sent to its most popular lists.

For its part, Topica argues that it had no choice but to begin putting the ads into messages sent through the busiest of its 34,000 discussion lists. The company has stayed afloat through frequent financial struggles by developing paid Web-based marketing services, but executives say that for the free lists to survive, they had to start becoming self-supporting.

Surprisingly, Topica is not offering its discussion list owners an option to pay for ad-free lists, choosing to go entirely the ad revenue route.

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