Friends Reunited is one of the UK’s internet success stories and provides bags of inspiration for go it alone entrepreneurs like myself because of its humble beginnings.

The website was started by Steve and Julie Pankhurst from their home in North London in July 1999 and was officially launched a year later. The idea was simple. To use the internet to reunite old school friends - and it proved an incredible success.

It is currently one of the most visited UK websites with 12 million registered users and another 5,000 signing up each and every day.

At the tail end of 2005 it was announced that ITV were to buy Friends Reunited for £120 million - with up to a further £55 million payable in 2009 depending on Friends Reunited’s performance.

There are numerous ways to make a website pay and to date Friends Reunited’s success has been built on a subscription model. Anyone can use the site to search for old school and university friends for free, but to become a member so that you can message other members you have to pay £7.50 for a six month membership. And the last figure I saw said that Friends Reunited had 1.8 million people doing just that.

But the worldwide web is continually evolving and what has worked to date might not work in the future. Sites like Facebook and Bebo have arrived on the scene, offering similar social networking possibilities - but for free. And while the new kids on the block are enjoying phenomenal growth, Friends Reunited’s traffic levels have stalled according to a report in the Guardian that says that the subscription model may be abandoned in favour of more free access in a bid to compete against their new rivals.

This interests me because for a while now I have been looking at niche sites that charge visitors to access information - despite the fact that they don’t have a monopoly on such information. They get away with it because either the competition employs similar subscription models or there is no competition worth speaking about.

For me such niche markets offer golden opportunities and I currently have websites that have entered two such niche markets offering free access to that same information with revenue coming from advertising.

It’s a slow building game and it will take 18 months to two years before either of my sites will be seen as a threat to the current market leaders, but the signs are looking good. One of the sites was launched in April 2006 (I talked about it here) and attracted just 17 unique visitors in its first month. Traffic for this year peaked in August at 17,561 unique visitors - and it would have been higher given the nature of the site if the British summer hadn’t been such a washout. Next August I’ll be hoping for 50,000 unique visitors.

In the big scheme of things 50,000 unique visitors a month isn’t a lot, but remember we are talking about niche markets here.

Maybe disrupting existing markets is something you might consider as you surf around the web. You never know - it just might lead to your own success story.

PS Markus Frind did just this and found big success.