Is print -> digital feasible?

[Umbran]

Can anybody think of case history where shifting something from a physical medium to a digital medium has gone well?

Note that this question is a bit different than the thread title. There's a difference between, "How often has this been done well?" and "Can it be done well, and how?"

The fact that many have failed to do a thing does not mean the thing is infeasible - it may imply that the thing is difficult, or there's a trick to it that hasn't been discovered or communicated yet.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The music industry is going to be primarily digital delivery in the next 10 years I'd wager with buyers of physical copies in the same boat as vinyl lovers are today.

Sooner than that.

And the transition of specialty stores from the local audience of brick and mortar to the global audience of online is unbelievably common now.

Classified ads, want ads, movie listings, real estate ads, they're all incredibly popular online.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

the person who reads a newspaper every day is less likely visit CNN.com, and the person who likes to post on a music message board is less likely to read Rolling Stone.

All the research the newspaper industry has done says that this is untrue overall, and where it is true, it's only true for older demographic groups that don't spend much time online.

The 70 year old D&D players will be less likely to use the DI than they were to read Dragon.

 

[TheYeti1775]

In all honesty, porn does a lot for advancement of technology: VHS, DVDs, the internet itself.

Very true statement, if it weren't for the Porn addiction of the world, we would still be on the old BB boards.

 

[SteveC]

Can anybody think of case history where shifting something from a physical medium to a digital medium has gone well?

In a word, no.

I've written about this before, but in the 90s I worked with a large national ISP that was trying to get into the content market to compete with AOL. They decided to partner with a number of the big online websites that were moving to exclusive pay only content, and provide their members free memberships to those sites. As a result, I received lifetime subscriptions to about 30 of these pages, and also had to support end user questions about how to use them. In short, none of them were successful. The vast majority of them are long since out of business, and the ones that are still in business have shifted to an ad based revenue system a long time ago.

People have pointed out that Pyramid is a successful online gaming magazine, but at a cost of $20 per year, I seriously doubt it is a success story of the kind that WotC is looking for. What's more, not to knock it (really, there's good stuff there...), but the quality of the content is nowhere near what I would consider an acceptable replacement of Dungeon/Dragon.

From my experiences with online content providers, this is something that's really hard to do well, and requires a large staff updating things on a daily, and sometimes hourly basis. From what I've seen, a Star Wars preview was delayed by the fact that the one person who could post it was on vacation. Is WotC looking to hire a huge number of new people to manage this? Has there been any advertising for jobs? Are they going to outsource the thing?

No one has any answers to these questions at the moment, so I'll just tell you what I know from my experiences: there is a huge amount of money to be made on the Internet, from services like EBay to online dating, but content providing is not the way to do it. It's just simply not a cash cow.

What's more, there is a huge value to having a flagship magazine in print that is distributed by mass market. It legitimizes your business to a large degree. A web magazine? Not so much. In doing this, I would argue that WotC is actually reducing the value of the D&D brand.

So I guess I'll just say that I believe this is a terrible idea. I hope I am 100% wrong, but that would make WotC the only real success story in this business, at least the first one that I'm aware of. I'm sure others will correct me if I've missed out on any glaring success stories in other industries.

--Steve

 

[Deset Gled]

But enough about me. I think that the recent traffic here (and elsewhere) disproves your point on a statistical basis: people who read Dragon sure as hell do visit message boards. And they start threads.

Is this the majority of Dragon readers, though? Or is it just the vocal minority? How many of the angry posters really are subscribers, and how many are just general WotC haters? How many people only came online because of the news? Obviously, WotC is banking on your line of thought being right. I'm note so sure.

All the research the newspaper industry has done says that this is untrue overall, and where it is true, it's only true for older demographic groups that don't spend much time online.

I would be very interested in reading about such research. Do you have any links? This is exactly the type of info I'm interested in. Obviously, I started this thread knowing what my personal conclusions were, and am looking to see if there's evidence to support it, but I'm just as interested in info that debunks my theory.

 

[Nifft]

Is this the majority of Dragon readers, though? Or is it just the vocal minority? How many of the angry posters really are subscribers, and how many are just general WotC haters? How many people only came online because of the news? Obviously, WotC is banking on your line of thought being right. I'm note so sure.

I dunno. There were, what, 50k subscribers to Dragon? Is that right?

As of today the WotC boards (which is more than just D&D) has 227,114 members, of whom 44,113 were 'active' in the last 90 days.

ENWorld (which is also more than just D&D, but is mostly D&D) has over 50k members today. That means registered, I presume, rather than paying. But I'm curious how many paying members there are, too.

-- N