The Money is in the List ?

I know many of you have heard the phrase "the money is in the list", namely a newsletter subscriber list. I wonder if that's true in all cases and whether it's worth the trouble, for a free newsletter anyway. As you know, you can spend a lot of time writing an ezine and taking care of unsubscribes manually etc., for basically no compensation at all.

I have a subscriber base of some 20,000 and have published a newsletter for almost 2 years now, but, I have found that any ads in the newsletter, however modest and nice, are always ignored. It's even hard to give away things for free.

I have mainly used companies that obtain names for you at a price per subscriber, to build my list. Perhaps that's the problem, I don't know.

I have had good articles and content in my ezine, but any request for people to click on a link to an offer, almost never works.

Perhaps the majority of newsletter subscribers are just freebee seekers and never intend to buy anything, no matter how much or how good the offer ?

My two questions are :

1. For those of you who publish ezines and have a website(s), is your income from your list, or is it mainly via visitors to your website through traditional means (search engines, articles you have published elsewhere etc.) ?

2. I have noticed that many ezines are going to either a paid website format or a paid newsletter format. That sounds like a good idea - is that the trend for the future ? It seems logical that paid content would weed out people who want things for nothing. I also realize that not many would pay for an ezine, unless it offered a great deal.

Your comments would be appreciated. Thank you.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all !

Ken.