I haerd there will be advertisments.  But no mention of free anything.

Hey, if you can have your cake AND eat it too, why not?

There are several ways to make money,  advertisements aren't in game because Sony is doing it out of the kindness of their hearts... having said that I agree a company doesn't want to lose money, but sometimes it pays off to take a momentary lose, if you make up that loss later on  (eg. free trial periods).

Anarchy Online does fairly decent with their free strategy from what I've gathered but... to get the full game you have to buy it. There's a lot of zones, items, weapons, skills that you don't get if you just play the free version. 

I don't think MXO could do that now.. but I really think if more people played Matrix Online they would like it (after CR2.0). The question is how do you bring them here, after such an abyssmal launch/reputation of MXO and SOE?

Currently SOE has the following alternative-revenue things going on:

- EQ2:  'Station' servers allow people to buy and sell items for real $.  NOT my idea of a good time, but for those that like it, it exists.  I don't follow that stuff closely enough to know if it's had any effect on the other companies who do that stuff (and break EULAs in doing so).

- Planetside:  Free ... to a point.  Apparently you can play Planetside for free but cannot progress past some 'cert' level or another.  I believe Planetside also has ads of some sort.

Now I don't expect much of anything to happen here until the combat revision is finished.  Then I'd assume SOE would like some return on the investment and will attempt to respark interest in MxO.  Whether that means more ads or limited free content is beyond my guessing.