Admit it. You secretly read US Weekly when you're at the dentist office. You kind of care about what happens to Speidi. You're maybe even just a little curious about whether Jennifer Aniston is actually dating John Mayer cause, y'know, you were so destroyed when he broke up with Jessica Simpson.

It's okay. You're not alone. Our thirst for knowing what Angelina Jolie is doing right now has spawned an entire industry of small gossip businesses, and for good reason. Nearly any enterprising entrepreneur with a taste for trash and a laptop can get in on it. The business plan is simple: purchase a sassy domain name, post paparazzi pictures, make snarky comments, and most important, get advertisers to buy space on your site. It's been a successful, if not formulaic model, for multiple gossip entrepreneurs.

Where things seem to fall apart though, is when these websites ask readers to actually pay for content. Yesterday, love him or hate him blogger Perez Hilton launched a service where, for $5 a month, subscribers will get a [recorded] call from Perez "whenever something big happens." Apparently the idea of paying for the service angered so many of his followers that Gawker's reporting today that his blog readers are "outraged". While it's hard to imagine anyone mustering "outrage" at Perez over a five dollar fee when he's best known for drawing obscene images on star's faces, some of his fans are threatening to defect.

What gives?

While Perez has built an incredibly successful empire—including a tv show, syndicated radio program, and a new clothing line at Hot Topic—looks like he made the critical mistake of forgetting his customers. Posts on his site ["sic" obviously implicit here] range from "I can barely fill my gas tank and you think im gonna waste my money on something so insignificant as THIS!!" to "For someone who's been posting on how bad the economy is lately you want people now to pay 5 bucks for news that you're going to end up reporting for FREE on your site eventually?"

Is there anyway you can convince customers to pay for something they once got for free—particularly when its an intangible like gossip? It's worth noting that other websites like Salon.com that have tried the for-pay model for content have suffered as well.

Did Perez slip with his business model, or are gossip devotees just cheap? While he obviously makes a ton of money through advertising (a daily spot on his site costs a rumored $50K), is too much to ask people to pay?