It turns out AOL's new "free" service comes at a price. You may have noticed earlier this week, as e-mails from AOL.com subscribers started coming with a two-line promotional tag. Now, Adotas confirms that AOL has adopted this new strategy to alert their own subscribers, and of course those they correspond with about the many features available through the company's portal.

The two-line promotional message shouldn't really disturb too many, especially considering other major services such as Yahoo! and Hotmail have used this strategy for years. However, as AOL and other similar online services continue to look for new venues to monetize this does beg the question as to what's next? With this, might the idea of adding a graphical advertisement to the bottom of e-mails be far behind?