Well, it was only a matter of time before someone did this. I'd like to be rolling out something along these lines with GamersClick, but ours will be like an adult version of our regular site (for example, we're going to have a whole bunch of interviews with adult-film stars ;). It looks like IGN is just trying to save their butts--no solid company is going to try something like this--and we're just going to try and get it going to cover costs. I have no delusions that the Internet is profitable ;)

I just find it fascinating that we now have web sites hawking Acrobat files you can print out to read in hard copy format. Wasn't the 'Net supposed to be part of the paperless revolution?

Yeah, that seems like a really moronic move. It's like everyone is trying to find every way imaginable NOT to use the strengths of the Internet at every turn.

--Dave

I just think IGN is really reaching with this idea. They obviously need money. PDF files are definitely not in my plans for "GamersClick Gold," but rather just a bunch of extra features... I sort of doubt the idea will work well, but it's not like it's going to take up a lot of resources.

Andy from Gone Gold had a great idea. What if they throw in real world goodies with your subscription? Like an OEM copy of a nearly current game? Or time-delayed discount coupons from EB?

EB gets cheap advertising, IGN gets subscribers, you the subscriber get access to IGN for almost free.

"I just find it fascinating that we now have web sites hawking Acrobat files you can print out to read in hard copy format. Wasn't the 'Net supposed to be part of the paperless revolution?"

The 'Net was going to kill the magazines. Magazines were dead. They couldn't compete.

IGN should just go all out and make the entire network fee-based. They have the Vault sites, which are popular. Leave the news pages free, but make everything else subscription-based. Might as well give it a shot. If they're not making it from advertising revenue now, that's not going to change anytime soon.

That's a good idea Mark. They're more likely to have subscribers pay for an entire network than just one core site. People would feel like they were getting more for their money.

I still think it's just a matter of finding a new form of advertising... something effective, where people will actually have a clickthrough rate higher than 0.5%. Personally, I don't think IGN is a good enough site to charge money--Gamespot is, in my opinion, a far superior site. They (Gamespot) frequently has some great exclusive stories (check their 'The Final Days of Black & White'), and IGN doesn't. Their reviews are way too short (750 words is fine for a free site, but for a pay site? nope), they rarely have any editorial-type articles... there are a lot of better sites out there.

If you have a Palm and use Documents to Go, you can put the PDFs on your Palm (which is genuinely handly for reference while playing the game). DtG strips out most of the graphics and compresses the files to save space. Adobe released a Palm beta PDF viewer program, but it doesn't strip the graphics out and by all early accounts doesn't seem reasonable to use with larger graphics-heavy PDF files. I'm sure there are some PocketPC equivalents too.

Internet advertising suffers from the curse of reportability. It's the only form of advertising, pretty much, that has a built in monitoring system. People don't judge TV ads or print ads by how many people come into the store because of a single ad, namely because they can't measure such a thing well. But they do judge Internet ads by how often people actually click on them (come to the store, virtually). That misses the point, IMO, of advertising on the Web, which is to get people to see your ad, not to have them click on it. You'll never get click through high, because people just don't want to spend the time, any more than while watching a commercial most of us leave the TV and pick up the phone to call in an order...

Now, I'm not one to think that paying for stuff on the web is rediculous. The Penny Arcade guys make a buck or two on their micropayment donations (don't know if they're in the black with it, though).

But this IGN Insider thing is a total joke. Here's the list of nifty stuff you get:

1. A print-ready PDF thingy. For $20 a year, I can get a print magazine, and I don't even have to use up $40 worth of injet cartridges a year to print it out.

2. Special message board abilities where you can use icons and HTML. OOoo! Hot DAMN! I can post links and use icons? And it's only $20 a year? Where do I sign? Not like every UBB board on the web doesn't do this already.

3. access to a special weekly Q&A with the IGN editors. Um...what, I can't mail in to your letters sections anymore? You're gonna stop answering those?

4. read a weekly IGN roundtable where the IGN editors discuss topics. That one's priceless. Isn't that what they do in about 30% of their articles anyway? It's 80% of DailyRadar's content. This one, along with #3, seems to think that I find IGN's editors somehow magically appealing in a way that the other 67,000 editors on games websites aren't. It's not like gamers can't email just about any developer known to man these days.

5. early access to strategy guides in PDF format. Well, this only means that they'll delay putting those guides up for those who don't pay. Thanks.

6. special IGN wallpapers. Now wait...this is something SPECIAL. This is EXTRA fucking special. This is worth like $60 a year, not $20. IGN *WALLPAPERS*, man! Hot DAMN!

7. watch the IGN editors work through a live netcam. Uh... again, am I supposed to really be so enamored with some editors that I want to watch them WORK? Editor hubris is a problem in games publications lately, and IGN seems to think it's worth shelling out extra for.

8. See quicktime game movies with editor commentaries. You know, I'd pay you $20 a year to NOT comment and just let me hear the damn game. You can comment in text on the page we download it from, like you do now. And please ditch quicktime in favor of MPEG or something.

9. check out a weekly IGN comic strip. Um, they realize that there are 10,500 free web comics out there already, right?

10. "Plus, in the not too distant future, IGN will roll some of its regular features behind the Insider label" That's just so dumb it's funny. Not only will nobody pay for the Insider thing, but now all their traffic to the free sites is gonna drop off when they move all the interesting stuff to the "insider" sections. Genius!

This whole Insider thing seems predicated on people really liking IGN stuff becuase the IGN editors are so great, and the idea that IGN has info that you can't find in a dozen other places. Neither of which is really true.

Sign me up!

Heh... my thoughts exactly. At least with us, you're gonna get HARDCORE PORNOGRAPHY. Heh, well maybe not, but it's still a little more interesting ;P

"At least with us, you're gonna get HARDCORE PORNOGRAPHY."

Whoa! How much? I thought GOD already went this route.

wumpus http://www.gamebasement.com

GoD doesn't actually have nudity - we will ;)
It's a cheap-ass marketing scheme, but I think it'll work (not very well, but it will draw more viewers than just the regular content).
Actually, all of this depends on what kind of deals we can get with the major porn folks - we've got deals in the works with Wicked Pictures and Jill Kelly Productions, where we interview their girls, pump their sites, etc. The Gold section would be our regular site, plus the porn stuff, a buttload of contests (for game and such), tournaments, and anything else I can think of. I won't be charging too much for it, since I would never personally pay a lot to visit a website... maybe like 5 bucks a month... Pay for the whole year, and get 20 bucks off or something... who knows. First, I want to focus on getting the main site off the ground, and then start looking into the other model. I have to find out how many people would even be willing to pay--no point in setting it up, putting a bunch of resources into it, only to have 5 people sign up.

By the way, the porn won't be hardcore - only tasteful stuff ;)
Playboy style, maybe... without all the money. heh

I found this link to Snowball's 10-K on Fatbabies. $105 million in the hole, with significant losses continuing for the foreseeable future. They are definitely screwed.

They could have taken the $105 million, put it in a CD at 5%, and made $5,250,000 a year. That's enough to pay 100 people $50k a year to do nothing, and still have $250k left over for games and snacks. I think my business model is far superior; now I just need $105 million and we are all on the gravy train for life!

"By the way, the porn won't be hardcore - only tasteful stuff ;) Playboy style, maybe... without all the money. heh"

Wow, and here I was thinking you were kidding. :\

I like Supertanker's idea though.

wumpus http://www.gamebasement.com

Our regular section is geared towards 16-25 year-olds, while the Gold section is geared towards 18 to about 30 year-olds...

Yeah, they've definitely got the wrong people running things.

In the future, I propose that everyone, rather than running the companies directly, give their money to Quarter to Three, who then distributes it to us (after taking their cut, of course), and then we'll take our cut, and, with what's left, run the companies the way they should be run.

I just clicked on a preview and now I have to sign up as a "user" just to read those articles there? They seem to be gathering a bunch of demographic information with the sign up too and then asking me to pay the money if I want to for the extra bullshit. Have a look...

Sonic Adventure 2 Preview at IGN

This signup seems to be twofold. If I don't sign up, I can't download the QuickTimes which is the main reason I frequent the site. Not only do they get those demographics, but if I don't sign up they keep bandwidth down. Interesting move...

...oh, and I didn't sign up.

--Dave

"This signup seems to be twofold. If I don't sign up, I can't download the QuickTimes which is the main reason I frequent the site. Not only do they get those demographics, but if I don't sign up they keep bandwidth down. Interesting move..."

Yeah, but if enough people don't sign up then their traffic falls and they're less and less attractive both for advertising and for getting exclusives. It's a problem.

Funny, I went to that link and they didn't ask me to sign in, even to look at the movies. Am I special?

Yes, Robert, you are. You full-timers at CGO/M should set up a webcam, and make yourselves feel all special. I just think IGN has a major ego problem.

Robert Mayer, yeah its goofy like that. If I try to access archived reviews and previews it says I have to subscribe but others it doesnot. I guess the cookies aren't in place yet

http://biz.yahoo.com/e/010330/snowd.html

Snowball's just grasping at straws now, coming up with quick plans to get some revenue coming in. They're burning over $10 million a quarter, they've got only about $31 million left in the bank (as of Dec 31), and they've got something like $100 million in debt.

My favorite section of these annual SEC documents is the mandatory "risk factors" section. Here's my favorite quote of all from Snowball's:

"We have a history of losses and expect to incur substantial net losses for the foreseeable future. "

I've got no problem with Pay Web Stuff. In theory, it's going to become more common and necessary.

But Snowball is taking a business that is fundamentally designed for an advertising-supported free market (and that has a lot of adverting-supported free competition) and is trying to tack on a pay service. I don't think that's the way it's gonna happen.

Even the WSJ online had to stop charging, and they're the ones that everyone said would be able to charge. Why did they have to stop? Because even if it's not quite as good, people can get their news and financial data from a dozen different places online for free.

Pay online services are going to have to be services designed from the beginning to be pay services, and as such offer stuff that you just can't get for free elsewhere.

Consumer Reports online is a good example. One, they have minimal production costs, since it's just an archive of the printed magazine stuff. Second, they provide a service that there's no good free competition for. I can get consumer-reports style reviews, guides, and ratings for products from any other single source on the 'net. I can find stereo reviews at another site maybe, but they're inconsistant, and I can't find car reviews there, or toothpaste quality comparisons, or which bolwing shoes are the best.

There seems to be more to this than just some extra content put behind a login. Read this page...

IGNInsider

They're going to put some of the regular stuff behind the "wall". So this is essentially turning IGN into a pay site. Now how does this affect the affiliates? Will sites like Gone Gold have to start charging also or just get out? The mind boggles...

--Dave

Once you start to put content in the pay section (or "behind the wall," as Dave says--good phrase, that), you effectively kill off your advertising revenue model. Once content starts to flow into the pay to view area, you aren't going to generate content for the free site, or at least, there will be a strong incentive not to, as something worth doing is worth doing for the pay site, eh? And once you have no content coming in, no one is going to visit you, and thus no advertisers.

Of course, if you are able to make your pay site work, you can make money, maybe. But you are going to kill off what ad dollars do remain, and more importantly, what ad dollars might be there in the future (assuming of course that you have a future, which is what all of us are staring at).


I do think that moving from free to pay is not a great idea in theory, because products designed as free don't necessarily make the transition to pay very well. It's better to design for pay from the ground up, but then again, not too long ago the pay to surf model was discredited, never to be broached again...irony of ironies.

You might as well toss a 20 dollar bill in the fireplace and watch it burn, it'll be just as productive. When Snowball/IGN runs out of money later this year and files for bankruptcy, you won't get a dime in return. Subscription and Internet are oxymorons. The bottom line, the clock is ticking on IGN and there's no way out. It's just a matter of time now.

It'll be a sad, sad day when our options dwindle down to Daily Radar and GameSpot. Daily Radar is... well, Daily Radar, and GameSpot... is there a bigger bunch of brown noses?

I have to agree on the DailyRadar thing, but I think GameSpot's actually an acceptable site. Sure, they tend to give some high review scores and such, but it's better than having to read GAMESPY (sorry Mark... it's not your article, it's all the idiots that work there :)

I don't think subscription sites are a definite no-go. I just think someone has to, as Robert said, build a subscription site from the ground up. Never plan on making it a free site. It works with porn, so why shouldn't it work with regular sites?

Apples and oranges, my friend! The porn industry and the gaming industry are totally different. Of course people pay for porn. That's a no-brainer. But paying for gaming information? I dunno.

I think that as long as the subscribers get something useful (game guides or something along those lines), which saves them money, then it's worth it. Who knows, maybe if you get someone subscribing for a year at 60 bucks or something, you can send them a free game, basically negating their costs. Makes sense to me... it just has to be executed properly.

I'd take Gamespot over Daily Radar any day. And hey--CGO's not going anywhere, at least not for the forseeable future. We have the advantage that the web site shares almost all of its costs with the magazine (in fact, since the two share the same staff, the web site costs relatively little to run).

Tru dat, yo. And Ben, check your email sometime ;)

Which brings up a great point... wasn't Snowball a spin off of the Imagine Publishing label? And if so... why did they want to incur all that extra staff and basically ignore the supposedly best brand in print magazines by not running a PC Gamer web site in the IGN vein? Same goes for the dissolution of the Next Generation site and any other Imagine print rags they never bothered to find synergy with on the web...

I've always been a bit hazy on their approach. Daily Radar seemed like such a goofy way to change things up after they closed next-generation.com which was a daily visit for me. Now I rarely even bother looking at Daily Radar. They threw the baby out with the bath water there IMO. The reason I love CGO is because the news is just the most important facts with very little community noise breaking it up. It's real NEWS and not a link to one quip on a web board about Half-Life 2 or something similar. The reviews/previews are in the print mag too, but I find myself reading them in BOTH places for some reason. I did this long before I wrote for the magazine too. My habits haven't changed at all WRT CGO since long before I started freelancing back in August of last year.

The only thing I can see is that the lure of venture captial was simply too great in the boom years of the net. They couldn't help but grab some of that free money.

--Dave

>why did they want to incur all that extra staff and basically ignore the supposedly best brand in print magazines by not running a PC Gamer web site in the IGN vein?

Because Snowball is not Imagine...that was the whole point of the spinoff. Imagine saw that their web properties were bleeding money like crazy and spun off the company to do its own thing. As part of the deal, they gave all the IGN properties (which had all this value on paper). PC Gamer is an actual asset, so Imagine hung on to it. Snowball doesn't somehow have the right to the Imagine brands or publications. Which is why, when you go to next-generation.com, you get a DailyRadar/UGO site, not a Snowball one.

I don't know how a pay site would get the kind of content it needs to make people want to pay for it. I mean, what's important on gaming sites is exclusive content--exclusive screenshots, demos, movies, previews, etc. If I'm a game company, I want to get that stuff out to a big audience. I know that the pay sites or pay sections of free sites have smaller readerships. Why would I give my exclusive content or info if it's going on a pay site? I'm concerned with promoting and selling games, not sacrificing the breadth of my PR to put money in a web company's pocket.

>My habits haven't changed at all WRT CGO since long before I started freelancing back in August of last year.

Then start clicking on some ads, damnit! =)

"I don't know how a pay site would get the kind of content it needs to make people want to pay for it. I mean, what's important on gaming sites is exclusive content--exclusive screenshots, demos, movies, previews, etc. If I'm a game company, I want to get that stuff out to a big audience. I know that the pay sites or pay sections of free sites have smaller readerships. Why would I give my exclusive content or info if it's going on a pay site? I'm concerned with promoting and selling games, not sacrificing the breadth of my PR to put money in a web company's pocket."

Yeah, I agree. There's no real benefit to giving a site with a few thousand subscribers exclusive content when you can give free sites with higher traffic the same exclusive.

So many sites are run essentially as hobbies that I don't see free sites going away. All that's going to disappear are a lot of the professional sites, which is unfortunate. The only real problem that the hobby sites will have is paying for bandwidth if they become popular. Then again, they may be able to sell banner ads at a reduced rate to at least offset those expenses.

I don't see a single site being able to make it as a fee-based entity, but perhaps a network of sites might, if they were good enough and different enough. If you banded together Old Man Murray, Penny Arcade, Lum the Mad's, and a few others you might have a network that people would pay a few bucks a month to access. So far, though, porn and MMORPG games seem to be all that people are willing to pay for.

"Why would I give my exclusive content or info if it's going on a pay site? I'm concerned with promoting and selling games, not sacrificing the breadth of my PR to put money in a web company's pocket"

Good point. I agree. But I wonder, game companies traditionally give exclusives to the magazines over the websites. Presumably this is because of the "prestige of print", tradition and the more accurate subscriber base a mag can offer.

I'm not suggesting that a paid site would be analogous to a print mag, but, by the above logic, wouldn't it make more sense to give the exclusive to a whole bunch of highly trafficked free sites at once rather than waiting for PCGamer, CGM or CGW to run it first with a 2-3 month delay?

Of course, the cover story factor is also a consideration....

-Andrew

"I'm not suggesting that a paid site would be analogous to a print mag, but, by the above logic, wouldn't it make more sense to give the exclusive to a whole bunch of highly trafficked free sites at once rather than waiting for PCGamer, CGM or CGW to run it first with a 2-3 month delay?"

There's nothing as valuable as a magazine cover. If a game company wants to be on it, they need to give the magazine the exclusive or else the magazine will turn to someone else.

Also, it's not as if giving a magazine an exclusive means that the websites won't give you coverage as well. Heck, the websites are hungry for content. They don't say no to much.

Finally, I'm not sure that there's a game site that has traffic that really compares to a magazine. The three mags are all close to 400,000 in circulation. Is there a website with 400,000 unique readers? Pageviews are really a deceptive measurement. I know of one MMORPG site that does about 20 million pageviews each month, but their daily unique sessions top out at about 60,000. If I give this site an exclusive, how many unique readers will be exposed to my game compared to the kind of exposure I get from a 400,000 circulation magazine?

I don't really think any website, even Gamespot, compares.

Then there's the fact that if you post something on a website, any website (pay or free) it's in effect going to be disseminated everywhere sooner or later. Paying for basic content like game guides is silly if you can just wait a day and find it on some other site because someone uploaded it ten minutes after they downloaded it from the pay site....

You have to find content that is somehow both unique and unavailable anywhere else. A big database with a great search engine, maybe. Or live/responsive tech and Q&A support.

"So many sites are run essentially as hobbies that I don't see free sites going away. All that's going to disappear are a lot of the professional sites, which is unfortunate."

Wouldn't it be in the best interest of publishers to inject advertising dollars into the food chain, so to speak. If many of the professional sites are forced to close down, that means they'll be less online coverage for their products. The less consumers know about a game, the less likely they are to purchase that game. It might seem like less of a strain on their wallets now but what about in 12 months, when they're game isn't selling as well as they had hoped? Then again, a lot of PC titles don't sell well to begin with, so maybe I'm out on a limb here.

"Good point. I agree. But I wonder, game companies traditionally give exclusives to the magazines over the websites. Presumably this is because of the "prestige of print", tradition and the more accurate subscriber base a mag can offer."

The assumption here is that the same article would be seen by just as many people online. I'm not sure that's correct. People have short attention spans online--Jason had some metrics from his OGR days that indicated that most readers would only read the first page (or maybe two) of longer articles.

And even if a site gets X number of visitors in a month, very few of those visitors read every article. I'd guess that a higher percentage of magazine readers read all (or at least most) of the articles each month. It's also a more dedicated demographic--these are people who paid money to read about your game. Does that make them more likely to buy it? Maybe.

---

Quote:

If many of the professional sites are forced to close down, that means they'll be less online coverage for their products.

---

I hate to say this, but for Internet advertising you probably need to do something that's more like an advertorial than a banner ad. Banner ads just aren't very effective, and you can't expect advertisers to spend money on something that doesn't work.

"You have to find content that is somehow both unique and unavailable anywhere else. A big database with a great search engine, maybe. Or live/responsive tech and Q&A support."

Gamers.com tried the database approach. Live tech support would be nice, but expensive.

I really think the advertising model is the only realistic approach, but they need to come up with something that's more effective. And Interenet advertising revenue is always going to be limited by the unlimited number of competing websites that can spring up overnight. TV and radio stations are much more expensive to run and their numbers are regulated, so ad dollars are competing for limited slots. Not so with websites, where one person can build one over the weekend. It might not be as good as a professional site like CGO, but they'll sell you ad space for a fraction of the cost that CGO will.

All I know is, as long as this site is free, I won't be likely to pay money for any gaiming site, no matter what extras they give me. There are just some things I won't pay for.

---

Quote:

People have short attention spans online--Jason had some metrics from his OGR days that indicated that most readers would only read the first page (or maybe two) of longer articles.

---

We've found that click-thru rates drop for multiple page articles as well. We'd write longer ones but it doesn't really matter since pageviews don't earn us anything. Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose and all that.

Speaking of IGN, Snowball has laid off another 55 employees today, or approximately 1/3 of the remaining staff (IGN Wrestling among the casualties). It looks like NASDAQ is delisting their stock as well. Is that a fat lady I hear singing?

The fat lady's been warming up for quite awhile. Snowball may have enough cash on hand to survive for months, but they need someone to buy them to survive in the long run. The advertising market will never be what it was, and probably won't really turn around this year, if at all.

Hell, even huge sites like CNET might be doomed in the long run if they don't find a partner. For the 4th quarter last year 63% of CNET's revenues were derived from advertising. They have to be taking a huge revenue hit right now.

My guess is that Yahoo, Amazon, CNET and others will all be purchased or merged with "offline" companies.

At least Amazon actually sells something. If they can keep costs down they might make it, as their problem isn't their business, which is booming, it's the damn debt they picked up growing it. Their recent deal with one of the big "B" brick & mortart bookstores--Barnse & Noble? Borders?--is an interesting indication of how they're looking for partneres perhaps, though.

Yeah, I think Amazon has a good business model, and they seem to engender real customer loyalty too. You can blame Amazon for the whole "first mover" craze that caused everyone to invest in couches.com, petfood.com, etc., with the thinking being that all you had to do was be the first to establish a business in a certain niche to be successful.

But, like you say, they had to go into debt to get to where they are. Now they have to figure out how to show a profit and climb out of debt. They seem to be close to breaking even, but there are also rumors that they're running out of money. At least they probably can get additional funding, unlike Snowball which probably can't.

---

Quote:

Their recent deal with one of the big "B" brick & mortart bookstores--Barnse & Noble? Borders?--is an interesting indication of how they're looking for partneres perhaps, though.

---

"What's interesting to me is that the retail sites that seem to be weathering the storm the best are the ones that are tied to brick and mortar businesses."

Sure. It makes sense. They've already established their presence, have merchandise, warehouses, order fulfillment people, etc. To them the web stuff is just another business channel and not their entire revenue pipeline.

It's also interesting that the content businesses like newspapers, magazines, and TV that have established web presences aren't faring as well. Their business model, advertising, hasn't translated as well to the web.

It amazes me that a company like Amazon has financial troubles. Hell I use it, my friends use it, even my mother uses it. Amazon probably has one of the most recognizable brand names in the industry and an established active customer base second to none.

I know what you mean, I buy the majority of my books from them.

Amazon's problem, as I see it, is that they sell Tools and Gardening Equipment and Games and Books and...

Too many "ands".
Too many costly deals.
Too much advertising with too little care for profitability for too long.

Too many "toos".

Still, they are primed to take the cake if they last. As you said, everyone knows them, they've earned solid branding, and their customer service blows any brick and mortar I know away - which breeds loyalty.

If they run out of VC, expect them to get more.
-Andrew

"It's also interesting that the content businesses like newspapers, magazines, and TV that have established web presences aren't faring as well. Their business model, advertising, hasn't translated as well to the web."

Well we've been over this ad nauseam, but the ads themselves aren't working. What we have is the equivalent of the highway billboard on the internet, which is a very low-value advertising space.

When the entire internet is little more than a highway billboard, that's an advertising wasteland.

New, more intrusive-- and therefore more effective-- ads have to be created. I expect the ad market to perk up at some point. Not too soon though.

wumpus http://www.gamebasement.com

The whole thing I don't understand is that back a few years ago, around, what, say '96 or '97, before the internet perked up into the big ad giant it is now, sites did just fine and didn't advertise a fraction of what they do now.

I remember when Yahoo was a distant second to Altavista and A/V had hardly any advertising (correct me if I'm wrong, bad memory, I might have those backwards). Yahoo had more features, of course, and in the end ended up being the bigger portal, but still, if the companies could survive once without ads, why not now?

Is it because they got fat and greedy and overbloated with useless features while the times were good? Could be, and now that the floor's fallen out from under them and there's not enough room for all those features, what're they gonna do?

The logical thing would be to go back to the old model, dump a big load of the most useless content I've ever seen (I mean, come on, Yahoo! clubs is actually good content? Ha. And does anyone actually goto Amazon to buy anything but books and music and movies? No, so dump the rest of the crap). It seems like a drastic fix, but it could work.

At least, in my understanding it could. But it could also backfire, you kill off things alot of people like, and suddenly you kill off alot of visitors to your site (referring to Yahoo! here, not Amazon). Basically that's what IGN's doing, right?

The problem is that all these sites got overbloated, it has nothing to do with anything else, really. They got too big for their britches and never thought to think to the future. You can tie that in with any brick & mortar company, because if a brick & mortar company gets too big for their britches and doesn't think to the future, then you get screwed (Venture trying to compete with Target by changing their entire strategy and product catalog, Montgommery Ward trying to compete with Sears by turning into a hardware and department store).

That's a loose analogy, but it makes sense (at least to me).

Bad management, bad management, bad management.

And I'm stopping to make sense, so I'll finish this post, it was a late night. =)

Actually, the main reason that internet advertising has failed, in its previous forms, is that advertisers finally realized that they really weren't getting much for their money. The banners were meant to familiarize readers with different sites and services. After continuous exposure to ads, people just started to block them out (not technologically, but mentally... I know I do), and they just become the generic thing at the top of the page.

RE: Met K's message:
The reason the net companies looked so good and offered so much before (with little to no advertising) was because they were thriving on millions of dollars in venture capital.

They used that money to grab as much of the pie as they could. Get noticed, promote, dominate the industry, etc., Profit? "We'll think about that later!", they cried.

Now, people expect profits from them which is proving difficult to impossible for many.

Your solution proposals are probably what they'll have to do of course...
-Andrew