Newspapers haven’t yet found the secret sauce of getting consumers to pay online, but games publishers certainly have. While Rupert Murdoch delays his grand paywall scheme and local papers start to tentatively get in on the act, Activision-Blizzard’s World of Warcraft celebrates its fifth birthday this week: its 12 million players pay £8.99/$15 per month (equivalent to £1.29 billion/$2.16 billion a year).
What makes pretending to be an elf more profitable than publishing news and information online? Maybe newspapers could learn a few things from the world of games as they try to monetise digital behaviour…
Patrick Smith says people will pay for interaction and explains the concepts of “news as gaming” and “leveling up” (reader rewards). (read the full article)
What do you think? Will gaming mechanics make newspaper site communities more engaged and eventually even make them ready to support newspapers and their sites financially?
Posted via web from mixedrealities’s posterous
