Intizen to charge fees for services

The portal site Intizen (www.intizen.com) announced Monday that it has begun to charge fees for its services, including e-mail, the construction of homepages and the production of animation files.

Some domestic portal sites already charge fees for selected services such as filmmaking, but this is the first time that an entire portal site has been turned into a pay system. Intizen's new policy is regarded as a touchstone for determining the workability of pay services on the Internet. Charging for services is expected to form a stable profit basis for Internet-based companies.

Intizen officials said that all 390 types of contents on the site, such as films, cartoons, Internet broadcasts and data, would be offered on a payment basis and that services such as games and music would soon be added. The allowable size of free homepages and e-mail services was reduced from 30 megabytes to 12 Mb and 10 Mb, respectively. But the capacities for paying subscribers were increased by 50 Mb and 100 Mb, respectively.

In order to transform itself into a pay site, Intizen deleted 300,000 false-name IDs from its total 2.3 million members since last October. In launching its pay services, the company is targeting 1 million members who visit its site at least once every three months.