John Battelle's Industry Standard hired research analysts near the height of its hubristic expansion c.2000. Former Red Herring editor Jason Pontin recalled that his magazine, the thickest of the dot-com bibles, attempted the same. He writes in an email:

We hired and built an entire research division: some of its material found its way into the print and online products. I do not believe they ever succeeded in selling much in the way of proprietary research...

You need to understand that there are really two kinds of research products. The first, which we tried to do and failed at, I completely supported as the editor at the time: expand our editorial products into higher-priced subscription research on the model of The Economist Intelligence Unit.

The second is truly proprietary research bought by a single client or group of clients: I wasn't sure that was a great idea, because it was an entirely new field for us requiring a new infrastructure and staff, and we failed at that, too.

Not coincidentally, perhaps, GigaOm publisher Om Malik is a Herring veteran, and made his bones on Wall Street, where proprietary research is common. His current effort is relatively inexpensive ($80/year) and targeted at broad groups of readers. It also has some sort of Web 2.0 twist involving outside contributions.

Hopefully for Malik, those differences will be enough to keep history from repeating itself.

(Pic by Jyri Engestrom on Flickr)

My own loyal Tumblr followers — well, 2 out of 45 — say the unnamed price is right. Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson agrees, with a caveat. "It makes a ton of sense," he told me. "They are still in the 'make the service great phase' though."

We agree. For all its impressive growth (9,394.1 percent, year over year), Tumblr can still only claim 510,000 visitors according to Compete.com. Flickr has 24.2 million.

Karp tells us he realizes free feature growth can't stop if he wants Tumblr's userbase to continuing growing so fast. Freeloading users will continue to get new features, too, he said. But they're going to be features that in turn help make Tumblr an ad-supported destination for the wider Web. We're guessing more pages like Tumblr's dashboard-like front page, except broken out into specific subject areas like "autos" and "women" so that ads can be more lucratively targeted.

New features that disproportionately raise Tumblr's hosting costs or require support, however, won't come for hipsters who don't give Karp their parents' credit-card number.

I'm pretty sure, however, that's there's one way to get out of paying fees for Karp's new features. Just a guess: Drive enough traffic to the site and Karp will be happy to comp your subscription and maybe more. Julia Allison new Web content company, for example, will be based on the Tumblr platform. And I bet she won't be paying.

Why? Paid subscriptions could probably pay Karp's bills. Fark.com founder Drew Curtis says TotalFark subscriptions bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars each year for his zany headlines site. But Karp's investors, including Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital, will pressure him to find a much larger revenue stream — something that gets its hands on all the money large advertisers aren't spending on the Web. Proctor & Gamble's annual advertising budget, at $1 billion, can buy a lot of airtime, but it can't get trust-funders who only watch The Office when it's embedded on the Web to change their detergent-purchasing habits.