A frequent visitor to ESPN.com quickly gets accustomed to the small logo attached to certain content. For paying customers, the orange IN box means access to premium content or services; for the rest, well, after clicking a few times and getting the screen that suggests becoming an Insider it?s pretty clear that membership has its privileges.

It?s up to the user to decide whether the privilege of reading Mel Kiper Jr.s? football scouting reports or articles from ESPN the Magazine are worth $4.95 a month or $39.95 a year. Meanwhile, ESPN, which provides more than enough free content for the average fan, caters to the super-fan and generates some additional revenue.

Watching someone make money from content should make other ostensibly for-profit online content providers happy or, at least, just a little pleased. But nothing is ever that simple on the Web.

Turns out while fans might hail the service and other content providers may admire the enterprise, not everyone appreciates one of ESPN Insider?s newer benefits -- aggregating sports links from more than 500 other sites. The links, known as 'site lines,' are sprinkled throughout the site where appropriate or can be surfed by sport and team from a central page.

Bob Benz, who sounds like a reasonable guy, doesn?t have a problem with the act of aggregating or even the fact that the results are available only to subscribers. The director of online operations/newspapers for E.W. Scripps Co. isn?t asking for revenue from the links that lead back to his sites, although he probably wouldn?t turn it down. It?s the way that ESPN goes about it that bugged him enough to post a recent rare message to Online News, a listserv operated by Steve Outing for the Poynter Institute, setting off a cascade of varying responses.

Say someone is interested enough in the University of Memphis men?s basketball team to go the ESPN Clubhouse microsite set up for fans of the institution formerly known as Memphis State. Somewhere on the page he or she will find a box with the header ESPN Insider Site Lines of the Day, three headlines with dates, author and newspaper, and a line that says 'Plus X more Memphis Site Lines on Insider. Become an Insider today!'

Insiders clicking on a The Commercial Appeal link once they?ve logged on go straight to the newspaper?s site and story; everyone else gets a screen extolling the benefits of being an Insider. If they?re so inclined they can use the links as a tip service and go to the relevant site themselves armed with information to find the story they want. While lots of folks experience this every day and probably shrug, Benz was offended.

'To me, it?s just a truth-in-advertising thing. When I got there as a user my expectation was to go to The Commercial Appeal to read that story,' he said. Instead, he found one of his sites being used as a way to sell ESPN.com?s service.

ESPN.com is no stranger to being linked to for fun and profit. 'It happens to us all the time,' says Geoff Reiss, senior vice president of programming, production & operations. 'The rhetorical question I would ask here is how would the publishers we are linking to benefit by our not linking to this? What possible harm would come from having an opportunity for those sports fans to sample their stuff, sample their content in an environment that doesn't detract from [it]?'

One heck of a long thread later on Online News, Benz hasn?t budged from his initial response. 'My thinking hasn?t really changed. The thing that still makes me uneasy about it is they?re using it as a carrot to draw readers into their paid service.'

He would feel better about it, says Benz, if ESPN.com more clearly labeled the links as subscriber-only for those unfamiliar with the meaning of the Insider logo.

Would he expect ESPN.com execs to have a problem if he linked directly to their site? 'Here?s the difference. If I had that headline on my page and when you clicked it first came up with an interstitial ad and then I sent you to their site, I suspect they would have some problems with that. You?re throwing something between me and the content of the destination.'

Of all the things San Fransciso Giants fan Rich Jaroslovsky has wondered about when he wanders through ESPN.com, objecting to the benefits screen never crossed his mind.

'It doesn?t as a potential customer offend me that they?d try to charge me for this nor does the fact that they stop me and say you have to pay for this. The one thing that might give me pause -- and I?m not sure how I feel about it -- if I?m the site should I be getting a piece of that revenue? It?s the one thing that would make me think the hardest,' says Jaroslovsky, who is president of the Online News Association and a senior editor at the Wall Street Journal when he?s not cheering on Barry Bonds.

Jaroslovsky was not part of the Online News discussion, where revenue sharing came up fast and often.

My first response was to tell Benz as part of the discussion that it seemed fair to me as long as ESPN.com wasn?t framing the stories or trying any other monkey business like stripping out the ads. In retrospect, while I still believe that ESPN isn?t doing anything inherently wrong, I realize that my answer was based on my longtime familiarity with ESPN.com. Just because I know what the orange box means or realize that if it says Insider I have to pay to see it doesn?t mean everyone else who visits the site knows that.

Someone from ESPN.com can argue that they?re driving traffic to other sites that in turn can use that traffic to attract advertisers. Someone from one of the sites can argue that visits from users half a world away don?t do much for local advertising. And just when it looks like that particular issue might be solved say if ESPN.com changes its wording or drops a protesting site from the line up, another variation of the linking quandary will pop up somewhere else as efforts to make money from content evolve. One person?s solution is another?s problem. Coming up with answers is about as easy as putting mercury back in a broken thermometer.

About the only certainty is, as Jaroslovsky puts it, 'You?re going to see more issues like this than you did in the past. Questions like this are increasingly going to come to the fore.'

Back at Scripps, Benz isn?t looking for hard and fast rules.

'The beauty of the Internet is you can link all over the place.'

Of course, beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.