When celebrated blogger Andrew Sullivan announced yesterday that he would be leaving The Daily Beast, he didn’t know if people would pay an annual subscription to read his new independent blog. Now he knows the answer is a resounding yes, with $333,333 raised in the past 24 hours.

“Basically, we’ve gotten a third of a million dollars in 24 hours, with close to 12,000 paid subscribers [at last count],” Sullivan wrote today. “On average, readers paid almost $8 more than we asked for. To say we’re thrilled would obscure the depth of our gratitude and relief.”

Sullivan has been blogging for more than 10 years about politics, culture, and life in the United States. He moved his blog, The Dish, from The Atlantic to The Daily Beast in April 2011. But now he will operate it independently with a small staff.

Sullivan set a goal of raising $900,000 a year to maintain the current standard of his blog and to do it without advertising. People will have to pay $19.99 a year ($1.67 a month) to have full access to the site, but you also can pay more than than the minimum. Readers will be able to see a number of pages on the site before it prompts someone to pay. Sullivan is partnering with Tinypass for site metering. He elaborates:

If our goal was an annual income of somewhere around $900K — we erred on the safe side — we have gotten a third of the way there in 24 hours, which is why we’re all somewhat gobsmacked. We feared it would take far longer for us to get that kind of support. Total number of paid subscribers? Almost 12,000 right now. That’s still only 1 percent of our total monthly readership — so we have plenty of room to talk more of you into subscribing before the meter hits. And the current number is misleading because of that. We really won’t know how effective this is going to be until we actually have the meter in place. That’s the only true measurement of how many readers will eventually pay to read the Dish.

But as a kickoff, this has been, well, words fail. We don’t know how to thank you enough. Except to work harder than ever to make the Dish everything it can be in the future.

Sullivan’s decision to make his blog a subscription model echoes the same one made by the New York Times, which enacted a paywall in March 2011. The Times‘ digital subscriptions will likely generate $91 million this year, according to Evercore Partners analyst Douglas Arthur. If Sullivan can attract a small fraction of those kinds of dollars, he’ll be in good shape to keep his blog chugging along.

Andrew Sullivan photo via Trey Ratcliff/Flickr

Newsstand is essentially a collection of iOS applications from print publications. Newsstand appears as a separate folder on the iOS 5 home screen that houses each publication’s app. The app automatically downloads new content and sends users a notification when it’s available. Some of the 295 publications participating in Newsstand include the New York Times, Popular Science and National Geographic.

Nine of Condé Nast‘s publications — Allure, Brides Glamour, Self, GQ, Golf Digest, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Wired — are available through Newsstand. And while total digital sales are up, so are single issues sales, which have increased by 142 percent compared to the previous eight weeks, the company said.

Based on the current success, Condé Nast is planning to launch another three titles through the app store in early 2012. Those titles are Condé Nast Traveler, Bon Appétit and Vogue.

For Apple this marks a definitive success without exerting much effort. It seems that the only thing holding back the transition of digital magazines and newspaper subscriptions was the lack of visibility. However, with iOS 5, this issue has been resolved. Users cannot “hide” the Newsstands app in another folder, and thus, are forced to acknowledge it (and possibly even use it).

Have you used Apple’s Newsstand to buy a digital newspaper or magazine?

While certainly ambitious, and something that every online publisher will be paying attention to, the paper’s paywall plans seem both too expensive and too confusing to take off.

The $15 four-week subscription gets you unlimited access to the site on the web and via mobile apps on the iPhone, Android and Blackberry. A $20 plan offers four weeks of web and iPad access, and the paper will also offer a $35 all-access plan that will cover the web, phone and iPad. Existing subscribers of the NYT’s print edition will receive unlimited access to the paper via the web and mobile devices.

So how will the NYT avoid losing casual readers? Beginning March 28, the paper will allow visitors to read up to 20 articles a month for free. Once they hit the 21st article, they’ll be forced to choose one of the above subscription plans. The paper has already turned on the 20 article limit for readers in Canada to test out bugs before the US launch.

“This move is an investment in our future,” said Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman of the New York Times Company, in remarks to employees this morning. “It will allow us to develop new sources of revenue to support the continuation of our journalistic mission and digital innovation, while maintaining our large and growing audience to support our robust advertising business.”

So as not to completely lock out its content from search engines and conversation on the web, the NYT won’t count visits from search engines and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Readers coming from Google will only have access to five free articles a day.

Judging from my Twitter stream today (which admittedly is full of media personalities), response to the New York Times’ paywall plans seems to be mostly negative. I can understand why. The $15 a month base price just seems too high in a world where $8 gets you unlimited access to thousands of hours of content on Netflix. Yes, the two companies do completely different things, but Netflix’s pricing is worth paying attention to: it’s more of a “why not?” type of price that consumers don’t think too much about, versus the $15 “why should I?” price.

It may not seem like a huge price difference, but I think the New York Times would have been better off starting at around $10 a month for web access. At $15, the paper will attract dedicated readers but likely not as many casual readers as a $10 plan would.

In addition to being priced too high, I think the paper is also making a mistake by offering casual readers a measly 20 stories a month. I realize that the NYT wants readers to hit that limit sooner, rather than later, but it seems like a long shot that readers would want to subscribe after just 20 stories. (You can view how many stories you’ve read in the past with your free NYT.com account at the paper’s recommendations page.)

I wouldn’t be surprised if the NYT hopes to attract new print subscribers with its digital pricing. After all, you can subscribe to the Weekender plan for the print version of the paper for $12.60 a month, which includes complete access to the NYT’s digital content. As VentureBeat’s executive editor Owen Thomas pointed out on Twitter, Weekender subscribers remain far more valuable to the NYT than digital subscribers when it comes to ad revenues.

Photo via Adam Kinney

Dubbed Google One Pass,  the new service will allow online publishers to hawk their digital content on the Web and through mobile apps using Google’s existing payment service, Google Checkout.

Readers would then be able to access that content on a variety of devices using only their Google e-mail address and password.

The pricing is a direct take-on of Apple’s subscription service on iTunes, under which Apple would keep 30 percent of any sale of digital content, like newspapers and magazines, within an iPhone or iPad app — compared to the 10 percent slice of the sale price Google is offering under its service.

When publishers use One Pass, which for now is limited to online newspapers and magazines, Google will also share the customer’s name, ZIP code and e-mail address, unless a user decides to opt out.

With Google One Pass, publishers can then customize how and when they charge for content while experimenting with different models to see what works best for them. This could mean offering subscriptions, metered access, “freemium” content or even single articles for sale from their websites or mobile apps, said Google.

The service also lets publishers give existing print subscribers free or discounted access to digital content.

Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs had earlier said of its new service that it was more interested in bringing in new subscribers, not charging publishers.

“Our philosophy is simple – when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing,” said Jobs on Tuesday. ”All we require is that, if a publisher is making a subscription offer outside of the app, the same – or better – offer be made inside the app, so that customers can easily subscribe with one click right in the app.”

Google One Pass is currently available for publishers in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the U.K. and the U.S.