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I don't understand why Yahoo doesn't try charging for it. Monetizing it was tough, definitely, but it's been shown that actually CHARGING customers (as opposed to going with a straight advertising model can work).

If you're going to shut it down anyway, what's the harm in trying? Maybe have a "stay of execution" for a quarter - tell users you're going to charge $10/month for the service, and see how many users sign up. If you can break even, why not keep it?

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Wouldn't charging for it give users an expectation that the service would stay around for longer than a quarter. What if it's still not profitable? Now you have to close down with paying customers.

You're right - but given the situation, I think you could outline user expectations and see what happens. Services that charge money close down all the time.

I was envisioning something like reddit gold. They have more users/subscribers, and seemed to have a lot of success with their monetization.

Unfortunately they may have passed the Rubicon with that. I suspect that many of the people (including me) who would have been willing to pay have already gone ahead and signed up for another paid bookmarking site. The most active users are the ones who are most likely to have already heard about the shutdown, and the ones who would be most concerned about it.

Just as well, since it looks like pinboard gets the things that bugged me about delicious right.

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