"It all depends on perceived value," said Carrie Johnson at Forrester Research. "If you can get the same item free and with minimum hassle, it'll be a tough proposition to get someone to pay."
Another factor, Johnson said, is the strength of the site's overall business model. As a counterexample, she cited Webvan, the online grocer that shut down this month. Webvan's problem, she said, was not that consumers were unwilling to pay the delivery fees Webvan began charging last fall, but that those fees were not enough to shore up the company's business model.
Learning the hard way
It was a lesson learned the hard way by the delivery services Urbanfetch and Kozmo.com: even the service fees they began charging customers near the end were not enough to offset their bloated infrastructure, and they are now defunct.
In that sense, too, Moviefone made the switch from a position of strength. McGloin said that more than 90 percent of the site's revenue came from advertising and sponsorships, so the ticketing fees were not expected to carry the weight of the company.
Moreover, according to data from Nielsen/NetRatings, traffic to Moviefone.com consistently outpaces its competitors, with a monthly average of more than 3 million users this year.
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