In the last 2 months it has added over 1,000 new titles, and there are plans to add 1,500 more before the end of this month. The enhanced Search feature now lets users search across all categories, within specific groupings, by title, or by keywords. The service also offers 12 free, industry-specific E-letters delivered via e-mail on a weekly basis. Topics include E-Business, Personal Finance, Biotechnology, etc., and offer headlines and article excerpts on key industry issues. This parallels similar alerting products offered by Powerize.com, American Banker Online, and other online venues.

The service provides "Find, Buy and Read" features for over 2,000 publications, including newsletters, market research studies, analyst reports, conference and seminar transcripts, and other specialty publications. Brief abstracts describe the publications, with some additional information available about the publishers. When users move to specific subject categories, they may see a series of headlines taken from participating newsletters with free extracts available. Newsletters.com syndicates these specific subject flows to its Web distribution partners.

Users can subscribe to newsletters directly online. The company also offers a 30-day free trial and a guarantee that subscribers will get the lowest available price. For some publications, Newsletters.com offers "Instant Online Delivery" of source material to private "Reading Rooms" set up for individual users. The system alerts users to new content going into their "Reading Rooms" and allows them to quickly modify user profiles. Currently content appears in Adobe PDF format, but a Newsletters.com representative indicated that the company planned to add HTML format options as well.

The 11 free E-letters cover Newsletters.com's own activities, personal finance, technology, law, human resources, healthcare, telecommunications, industry, financial services, international business, and e-business. As one might expect, Web users still have a tremendous fondness for free information. With single publications offered by Newsletters.com priced at hundreds and even thousands of dollars, the fastest expansion in usage seems to fall in the free newsletters, which, according to Newsletters.com, are adding subscribers at the rate of 12 percent to 15 percent per week.

Currently Newsletters.com distributes products published by over 150 publishers. New publishers added to the group include the Meta Group; Reuters Business Insight (a joint venture between Reuters and Datamonitor); Business Publishers, Inc.; Atlantic Information Services (AIS); Information Gatekeepers, Inc. (IGI); EdVenture; Business Monitor International (BMI); and ActivMedia Research. Newsletters.com recently inaugurated a Publishers Advisory Board to facilitate close communication with its sources.

Sales routes outside the Newsletters.com Web site include direct corporate and institutional sales and relationships with industry-specific vertical Web sites. Newsletters.com reaps half of any subscription revenues generated from the site when it supplies an individualized Web presence for a newsletter; it will even digitize content if necessary. The site usually extracts one article from each issue for inclusion in a customizable package syndicated to some 400 Web sites with links to subscription pages in exchange for free content. Partner sites may receive up to 20 percent of revenue generated by a sales lead. Partner sites include Infospace, Reuters Moneynet, and National Discount Brokers.

The founders of Newsletters.com, Ari Jacoby and Elie Ashery, originally launched the company as Fination.com in 1998 and handled only investing and finance newsletters. Since then they have renamed the company and expanded to a wide array of business-to-business newsletters and alternative publications. They have received diversified funding from a number of sources, including some well-known investors such as Core Capital, eCompanies Venture Fund, Osborn Capital, and Steve Walker and Associates Investment Funds.