Subscription Model Creeps Into More Gash-Needy Sites.

IMAGINE you've found a nice free parking spot within a few blocks of your office home. You've been using it for years, almost without a thought, and it's become a small but comforting part of your everyday life.

Then one day you find a boot on your car.

Something like that happened to me the other day at one of my favorite Web sites. After years of delivering specialized sports news for free, Culver City-based Rotowire has joined the growing ranks of Internet content companies hoping to convert freeloading fans into paying customers. While the online industry is paying close attention to a similar transition at Salon, the fate of smaller sites like Rotowire will determine whether the Net can continue to offer diverse content in economic downtimes.

Rotowire (rotowire.com) is one of countless sites that sprung up to fill a niche never satisfied by traditional media. It offers up-to-the-minute news, analysis and other services for devotees of fantasy sports who build imaginary te ms with real-life players and compete against each other based on their statistics.

Before Rotowire and other sites began prong fantasy-oriented news about sports, fantasy-league players used to visit the library and scour out-of-town newspapers for information about players on their teams. Some even resorted to calling team officials and pretending to be re reporters in hopes of learning how badly a particular player was injured.

Rotowire, once known as Rotonews, had these fans to itself when it launched in 1997. Now it's one of many fantasy sports sites in a market that includes heavyweights like ESPN, Yahoo and CBS-backed Sportsline.com. Although these sites have greatly expanded the number of. People who play fantasy sports, they're all finding there's not much money to be made by relying exlusively on ads.

Rotowire's ad revenue has plunaged 75 percent in the past year, a problem compounded by the recent failure of its parent company. After adopting a new domain name, the free site was at acting 500,000 visitors a month -- not bad, but not enough to keep the seven-person company alive on advertising alone.

"We saw the handwriting on the wall," said Peter Schoenke, president of Roto Sports Inc., the company behind Rotowire. "We figured we weren't going to be in business come next baseball season unless we changed over."

Employees surveyed some visitors and came up with what they thought was a fair price: $9.99 a month or $59.99 a year. "if we could convert 10 percent of our unique users, would be loving life," Schoenke said.

Frankly, I think the prices are too steep. Rotowire now costs as much as The Wall Street Jo real, an international publication produced by a staff of thousands. It also costs twice as much as Salon.com charges for its much-publi-cized premium service, which has attracted less than 1 percent of the site's regular users so far.

But Rotowire does have a significant advantage over Salon. While that site caters to a general interest audience, Rotowire can count on th single-minded devotion of its readers - many of whom compete in leagues with cash prizes. Schoenke said he's also banking on competitors' cutting their losses and following his lead, thereby forcing fantasy sports addicts to any for the sort of information they once had to track down with legwork and guile.

In the end, I expect niche sites like Rotowire will have an easier time attracting a critical mass of subscribers than general interest magazines like Salon. Indeed, I may find myself cracking open my wallet for Rotowire soon en ugh -- particularly if they drop the price. For while it's easy enough to find free articles about President Bush or Osama bin Laden, go d leads on a productive running back are considerably harder to come by.