With FX set to debut its comedy based on a group of buddies tied together by a fantasy football league, we picked out a couple of early reviews. Check back with FSB.com early Friday to see our review of the premiere of “The League,” which will air at 10:30 p.m. Thursday.

- Barry Garron of Reuters seems to find the show sophomoric, implying that it tries to push the boundaries of acceptable basic-cable crudeness more than anything else.

- Tim Goodman of the San Francisco Chronicle, on the other hand, seems to like the humor put forth in “The League.” Then again, maybe the show is just more up the alley of a guy with a blog called The Bastard Machine.

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The whole free-pay quandary is a central issue for anyone trying to make money on the Web, and that couldn’t be more true in any industry than it is in ours.

Fantasy sports live online and have thrived since making their way to this frontier. Still, the seemingly cyclical debate of whether to go free with your content or games or to make users pay presents a challenge. At one time, Yahoo! was the purveyor of free fantasy wares, and pretty much everyone else charged.

Now, however, a bevy of free online options exist for fantasy players. At the same time, many other sites subsist because of pay games or subscriber content.

Recent times have showed us that most Web outlets need to figure out better ways to generate revenue than simply relying on advertisers and sponsorships. Scott Philp of Quick Hit says that not enough decision makers are thinking about this monetization issue from the start.

“Fantasy needs to adapt and take a page from the micro-transaction models that many online gaming companies are using,” Philp writes in an article for MediaPost. “Looking solely at ad sales and sponsorships is a mistake. Fantasy sports operators should be capitalizing on their users’ familiarity with the micro-transaction model and take advantage of it by implementing opportunities to spend throughout the games they play.”

Philp goes into greater detail and presents a nice opening to the discussion of how to monetize fantasy sites. His post has already generated some worthwhile comments as well from folks you might recognize within the fantasy industry (including our own Jeff Thomas).

It’s worth checking out, and we here at FSB.com would love to hear your personal stories on how and why your site chose its particular path at the free-pay fork and how it’s working out. Of course, any other thoughts on the subject (and others) are always welcome as well.