Yahoo!, the web's largest search engine has teamed up with Divine Inc to create the Premium Online Research Library. Divine, who recently purchased Northern Light will provide Pay-Per-View content to Yahoo!'s millions of consumers.

The Premium Online Research Library (http://premium.search.yahoo.com) holds 70 million pages of full text from a combined 7,100 sources. These include companies from many different sectors including News, Finance, Health and Science. So what does this mean for the average consumer? Well, you can now search for detailed reports on content that can't be found in many commercial areas of the Internet.

The content can be purchased two ways; either individually, ranging from around $1 to $4's (50p to £3) (or you can pay $4.95 (Around £3) per month for 50 documents, from a limited range of publishers. The service enables you to access to in-depth information from thousands of publishers on thousands of topics. This could very well be the start of what analysts have waited for; web content no longer being 'free', but subscription fee's could start to crop up across the Internet. The service is being introduced in Yahoo!'s finance section (http://finance.yahoo.com) and news (http://news.yahoo.com).

Northern Light, now owned by Divine Inc recently closed its doors to the public, offering only content from its Special Collection, similar to Yahoo!'s new Premium Service. This move also shows how much web content is becoming Pay Per View. At present, Yahoo!'s Premium service is in its Beta stage, and could be seen across the Yahoo network if successful.

Yahoo! Inc is a leading communications network, with an excellent brand. The company serves around 219 Million consumers each month, including its worldwide sites including the UK, Australia and much of Europe.