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By Sonya Rabbitte, 6 December 2001 17:23

NEWS E-card company Americangreetings.com is set to start charging users an annual subscription fee. From this week Americangreetings.com members can expect to pay an annual fee of $11.95 to send email greetings to friends and family. The fee will also apply to members of Egreetings.com and Bluemountain.com, rival sites until recently when they acquired by Americangreetings. The company, which reaches millions of web users through alliances with Yahoo! and AOL is the latest in a growing list of internet companies looking to boost revenue with the introduction of fee-based services. Aware that web users may be slow to fork out, Americangreetings plans to tempt paying customers with personalised accounts that allow them to design their own cards, and set email reminders for important events. But Scott Smith, director of Internet Strategies with the Yankee Group, said there is no evidence to suggest customers would pay for low value content, such as greeting cards. Figures from Nielsen/NetRatings for October show that Americangreetings.com received 9.6 million unique visitors, beating established clicks and mortar names like Hallmark.com, which attracted 3.3 million unique visitors during the month. While those figures are sure to jump over the festive season, Smith says the sums won't add up to big revenues. "Fees make common sense on paper. I can see how it was worked out in a business sense - the charge is obviously less than you would spend in a year on buying cards and envelopes and stamps. But consumers just don't work like that," he said.