right on.  The gaming audience is HUGE!  its almost cult like-  and why shouldn't it be?  While I dont quite get it myself, I appreciate the draw of gaming. And how much goes into producing these widely popular and successful games. These arent the games I grew up with. (or you, might i presume!).  Though I'm at the very tip of gen y, probably closer to X by characteristic rather than age, I had the kind of games where you go level after level and beat the bad guy, and the bad guy looks like a scary monster and thats that. Before that, I had atari and nintendo. even simpler. Ghosts and Goblins. totally addictive but simple games. but what these kids have now are masterful thinking games that require strategy and using your brain. The graphics are incredible and the storylines are intense and layered. And they appeal to people of all ages, including my almosty 30 yr old best friend who is a huge gaming nerd, who competes with other gaming nerds and loves it.

So i agree with you! If they want people to pay for subscriptions for web based content, they've got to invest like gaming has. Thats an audience thats getting their moneys worth alright.

Cheers,

Rich

Rich, I totally agree with you with regard to consumer feeling that they are already paying since they are paying for access to the internet. I think Online Media need to follow the path of XBOX Live or MMORPG games like World of WarCraft. Not only do these require you to have an internet connection, but you have to buy the game, (in the case of XBOX Live you need an XBOX 360) but you have to pay a subscription fee and millions of people do so.  Online media have to create some sort of benefit for subscribing like Microsoft and Blizzard without alienating people who want to want to access the content for free.

the print-based model of communications is dead. as the Old Sage wrote: "The boat sank. get over it".

there will never be any shortage of authors because everyone want to be heard. and as long as there is free access to the internet there will always be web-sites based on the contributions of thes good folks

and there will always be a tin-horn dictator someplace who will want to grab control of communication by any means at all

I think that somewhere someone will have to get to the unwritten premise of the Star Trek franchise created by the late Gene Roddenberry. The fact was that on his universe, not ours of course, private everything had been abandoned for an undisclosed way of economic society where everybody had whatever each one wanted without any reference of how it happened. In the mean time, we'll have to guess how to finance the current media "omelet with everything" we find each morning in the net.

The PEW article, which I read and planned on commenting before I found our Dear Nicolle in the gate, as always, is a very important piece of work. For one thing, it gets nowhere. And that's a fact of life. We are in the middle of something happening in the news and in internet's basic finance structure and nobody has a WAG of what's to come. As one commenter correctly pointed, we are already paying dearly for accessing and being here in the net. How is this money ever to get to the news producers is another story. but to think that there is going to be ANOTHER flow of money for anything is a mistake because as the PEW Research notes, everybody takes the exit lane when being charged anything more. It is almost comic that I, in fact, was among the few idiots that paid to TIMES News Select because I felt it was a right price for a good service. Well, very few other idiots were caught in and thats a lesson for everyone.

In the end it will not be the right price, or the right content or else by itself. We better look to Malcolm Gladwell, Nassim Taleb and Ray Kurzweill and folks to try to "see" what's to come. It will be something unheard off, a proto-combination of sorts that will caught the internet and establish itself by self acceptance as the right solution. That's the interesting part of the real Internet Evolution: the Who knows factor!

I read this theory somewhere but forgive me for not mentioning the source as I just cant remember or find it. It posits that the individual corporations, online publications, etc who keep making the claim that people want to see their content or anything else on the internet for free clashes with the fact that customers already pay their service provider so in their minds, they've paid up already. So why would someone be compelled to put their credit card down for access to a website when they feel like they've paid their monthly dues already to that popular club we call the internet. And is this a surprise? Look at how cable television works. You pay your monthly dues to a service provider, (time warner, cablevision, Optimum, etc..) and thats it, except for extras like on demand if they're not in your plan. At which point, you can watch as much TV as you'd like, park your keister on your sofa and not worry about having to pay once you get to a channel. 

And I strongly agree with this. The equivalent to successful paid content is if we had to log in and subscribe to certain cable stations but not others. Even if the money wasn't an issue, the idea of having to log in every time just ruins the experience. 

We're a society that is conditioned to pay for a package of entertainment and know how much that package will cost every month. 

Paid content online via subscription is a recipe for disaster. However, if the subscription somehow came with your connection package, you probably wouldn't even notice or feel it. I think thats the solution-  organically paid content that works the same as cable television (And any cable execs out there who take that idea into some meeting, I want credit!) 

And yes, im going to go ahead and say it. The only subscription based content that is or will ever be truly successful is porn. 

"Getting people to pay for news online at this point would be "like trying to force butterflies back into their cocoons," a new consumer survey suggests". Can you imagine how hard it is to force butterflies back into their cocoons??

Let's build and they will come and then we can start to monetize. Isn't this the mantra for the Dotcom bubble fo a decade ago? Do people inherent belive that the internet is a God given right and as such have no need to pay for anyhting beyond theior internet subscription?

I agree wtih KMT that people have learned to tune the ads out unless they are so outrageous or pop up in the middle of the screen (and that is just annoying!)  And as I have said before, people will find the free content and not pay for content.

Thanks, Nicole and yes,  the same comments apply to the music industry, but also the travel industry, encyclopedias, insurance sales, retail electronics sales...and all the industries whose familiar, comfortable business models have been disrupted by the Web.

This is the point made by "Free: The Future of a Radical Price" by Chris Anderson -- how does knowing that the price is dropping inexorably towards free change your business? Do you cling to the old model, and try to raise dikes (pay walls)? Can you structure your business to run on the revenue from the few who are willing to pay and tolerate the free-riders who will always far outnumber the ones who will pay? 

The Pew Report (I've just started reading the 180,000 words) categorizes the news sites it studied as "legacy" affiliated/owned -- newspapers, TV, radio, etc., vs. the online-only upstarts. In general, it's the legacy that's the problem!

I had to dig through a few hundred emails to find this one from last Friday, but this report by Comscore, while focused on comparing Europe and the U.S., should be encouraging to advertisers and online media:

The study, titled " How Online Advertising Works: Whither the Click in Europe," suggests users in Europe are 72 percent more likely to visit an advertiser's site having previously been exposed to display ads, compared with 49 percent lift in the U.S. In addition, it found European users are 94 percent more likely to conduct a search query on an advertiser trademark after seeing an ad, but are only 40 percent more likely to do so in the U.S.

Regardless of those discrepancies, the purported impact of display advertising in both markets will come as good news to both advertisers and publishers, as click-through rates, or CTRs, continue to decline. As the report states, "display advertising, despite a lack of clicks, can have a significant positive impact on consumer behavior."

http://www.clickz.com/3639766

cbrown, I don't disagree with your points. Targeted ads, at the moment when people are searching for the same thing as in the ad, are one of the great innovations of the Internet age. And the fact that a news story is about squabbles in Congress or war in Afghanistan certainly limits the targeted advertising possibilities. Newspapers (and TV stations) have had to wrestle with that issue for a long time. The main solutions have been to bundle lots of different elements together (news, TV schedule, comics, real estate and car dealer ads, want ads (remember that phrase?), etc.)  -- which no longer works in a world of ever-narrower niches -- and cheap content on the same channel to subsidize the news. In other words, soap operas, game shows, sitcoms, cop shows and now "reality" shows.

I hasten to say (if it wasn't already obvious) I don't have "the" answer, but the surveys by themselves don't doom the enterprise.