I think a major difference between the two was that from the beginning Star Trek's re-boot/change in lore took into consideration and worked around what came before without actually changing it (and in fact provided a continuing easter egg with the original Spock). It's an expansion (into alternate timelines) as opposed to a rewriting of the previous Star Trek lore.
The 2009 film made nearly $400 million. I don't know the precise ratio for converting that to viewers: but at what I would imagine is a conservative estimate of $20 per viewer, that is 20 million viewers. How many of them do you think cared about consistency with past Star Trek lore? Heck, even in this thread - which presumably has a higher-than-typical proportion of serious Star Trek fans posting in it - there was confusion over the whole timeline vs rewriting vs "imaginary story" thing!
But you've yet to show a property that benefited by excessive changing of lore and canon. I mean we have comic books as the prime example and they are failing.
All magazines are failing. All print media are failing. Why would you expect comics to be immune from this trend? Do you really think that, of all print media, comics would be flourishing if only they had preserved continuity and canon all this time?
I have yet to see @
pemerton show any evidence that frequesnt rebooting and changing of lore has actually helped a property...
One of the most successful serial fictions ever is the Marvel Universe. And it has constant changing of lore, as [MENTION=7635]Remathilis[/MENTION] and I discussed not far upthread - eg Bobby Drake, who was a teenager in the 60s chatting up Zelda (?) at a cafe in Greenwich Village, was still in his 20s in comics published in the 80s and 90s, when (if continuity were maintained) he should have been middle-aged.
As far as preserving lore is concerned, one of the best Marvel examples would be Quasar in the 90s, but I don't think it sold especially well.
As far as revising lore is concerned, if you don't like the Marvel comics examples then look at (say) Batman or Sherlock Holmes - these are characters who have had immense longevity and popularity, but have also been consistently reinvented and reimagined.
Or look at the Star Wars prequels. These pretty-much disregarded the lore of the original films (the Jedi are not wilderness-dwelling hermits and hardly have the feel of an ancient or hokey religion; the force is explained biologically rather than mystically; the Senate is not particularly admiral; etc), and their own plot makes virtually no sense; yet they seem to have made plenty of money.
Another way I look at it is this: the people I know and hang out with include a higher-than-average number of sci-fi/fantasy types. Many of them have been playing D&D regularly since childhood. But they barely follow the continuity of D&D lore - I'm pretty sure none would know what an eladrin is outside of 4e - and I doubt they follow the lore of Star Trek or Star Wars much more closely. If they don't care, I've got absolutely zero reason to think the tens of millions of people who go to see the Avengers or the Hulk would give a toss whether the random mumbo-jumbo spouted about Agard and the dark dimension is the same in film A as film B that they go and see three years later.
The Incredible Hulk was a failure.
But not because it rebooted! The reboot was an attempt to make it a success.
Or do you really think that if the second Hulk film had preserved the continuity of the first one, it would have done better?
And another example: the series that began with Batman Begins seems to have done OK, despite disregarding the prior films that began with Michael Keaton in 1989.