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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SteveC" data-source="post: 3489392" data-attributes="member: 9053">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</blockquote>

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