Japan's Kakaku.com moves Tabelog to subscriber service

After having built the eating out recommendation engine site into a monster traffic magnet, operator Kakaku.com is now planning to start charging users JPY315/month to use the service, which will be upgraded to work on the iphone. Until now, the free audience-ranked restaurant site has been attracting tens of thousands of visitors a week to see the best places to eat out. Currently Tabelog has mainly advertising income, amounting to JPY 285m (3.3M USD, 2.2M GBP) for the 3 months through to June.