AdCritic.com is back, for a price

AdCritic.com, an advertising-focused Web site bulldozed in the dot-com bust, has reemerged under new ownership and with a new formula for success: subscriptions only.

The Web site, an industry news publisher and hub for TV and radio commercials, closed late last year. As the audience for its free, streamed media grew, the costs to support the necessary bandwidth caused the project to fold, said its founder, Peter Beckman.

Ad Age Group, owned by Detroit-based Crain Communications, acquired the assets of the failed AdCritic.com in March, with the intention to build a new site to compliment its more established publications on the Web such as Advertising Age. The new site has been bundled with "Creativity," a print and online subscription-only publication geared toward creative ad professionals.

The introductory annual rate for AdCritic.com is $69.95 and includes 10 issues of Creativity magazine. It is also free to subscribers of the print publication. The site features a new commercial daily, breaking industry news, and a searchable archive of TV and radio spots.

The former site hosted a vast library of advertising video clips, including about 2,500 commercials. Before its demise, it drew a diverse crowd of ad junkies to its video library, delivering any where from 10 million to 30 million commercial video streams per month. It also pulled in regular visits from advertising executives, although they made up only a fraction of the site's audience.

"With its powerful database of spots, constantly updated news and commentary, AdCritic will again be the ultimate resource for people who must know what's happening now," AdCritic.com editor Jim Hanas said in a statement.

Paying to watch commercials ?

Does it not seem wrong for the consumer to pay to watch commercials ? Adcritic.com was great when it was free, but it is just absurd to expect people to pay for this service when the companies producing that ads would be more than willing to pay for the bandwidth for their individual commercials. Stop the Madness, 69.99 to watch what should be free is just rediculous.