For a long time now, large media companies have been toying with the idea of paid content on the web. Everyone from The New York Times to News Corp. is trying out their own unique twist on selling content. Unlike them, we decided not to charge for what we’d already been giving away for free. Instead we built GigaOM Pro, a subscription-only research service.

That was only a year ago — can you believe it? Many of you were generous enough to support us on this new effort and signed up for it, giving us a much-needed jump start. I thank you and look forward to learning from you and building a service that adds value to your days.

In its first year, GigaOM Pro:

• Signed up more than 6,000 subscribers
• Published more than 500 research items, including in-depth reports on the app economy, e-books and cloud computing and more than 100 company profiles
• Welcomed nearly 40 analysts into our GigaOM Pro Virtual Analyst Network
• Signed Microsoft, Adobe, Rovi, Juniper Networks, Peer1, RRE Ventures, Norwest Ventures, Hill & Knowlton, LewisPR and Accenture as enterprise customers; more than a dozen others are in the process of joining a growing GigaOM Pro community
• Established an Analysts Relations program, which has attracted 75 executives who are helping us shape the service
• Became available via the GigaOM app for the iPhone (download it from the iTunes app store.)

These have been some of the signposts making clear that what was once a dream is now a reality. The back end and various features of the service are fully baked. As a result, we are taking the “beta” tag off and with it, the beta pricing. Those of you who were our early supporters have been grandfathered in at the introductory beta price of $79 a year; new subscribers will be charged $199 a year for the hundreds of pieces of original, forward-looking, in-depth content.

As part of the first-year anniversary celebrations and in tandem with our third annual Structure conference we will be giving away our big report, “Defining Internal Cloud Options: From Appistry to VMware,” to conference attendees. Attendees that are already GigaOM Pro subscribers (or buy a subscription there) can also enter a drawing to win an iPad (Wi-Fi).

GigaOM Pro is the result of a collective effort, and while it’s hard to single out a specific person, if I had to it would be GigaOM Pro editor Celeste LeCompte, who has been tireless in her efforts to work with our writers and analysts to shape the final product. When we started, it was just Celeste and Michael Wolf, our VP of Research. Today we are a much bigger team and to each one of them, I say congratulations and thank you for your hard work.

On this anniversary, I want to express my gratitude to all of you who supported our efforts, sight unseen, trusting us to do the right thing. I hope we have met your expectations. And if we have not, we will work hard to make sure we do.

Here’s to many more years of GigaOM Pro.