Publisher Philip Kaplan, who began offering an upgraded version of his free F---Company.com site to paying subscribers at $25 and $75 price points this March, told NYPost.com this week that he has, "860 subscribers, paying an average of $63 a month." Combined with branded t-shirt and coffee mug sale commissions of about $10k a month, he's making a total of about $60k a month. Not bad for a content site with virtually no expenses.

However, for those of you keeping score on publishers' reported conversion rates from free-to-fee, Kaplan's are on the low end. He claims about 55k free newsletter subscribers and 3.3 million free site visits a month. Perhaps, as [Inside.com] has discovered, if too much of your content is free, people are less likely to pay for the rest. Figuring out where to draw that free vs. paid line can be difficult ....