[CM30]

And then the sites not set up for business reasons end up getting the lion's share of the traffic? Because for however many sites might add a paywall for pay for 'journalism', there's an equal number of sites run by people for fun/a side hobby that are willing to give it out for free.

That's always going to significantly limit paywalls online. Too much competition from hobbyists and non profits that see their goal as helping people rather than selling their work.

[manigandham]

There really isnt any competition from "hobbyists/non-profits". The top publishers on the web all produce a ton of content, none of it can be run without a big business operation which has to earn something, either through advertising or paywalls.

[CM30]

Well, in the gaming scene, most of my news comes from social media sites, fan sites and fan run wikis, which don't tend to be run as businesses.

For example, if I want the latest information about Zelda U, I wouldn't go to IGN or Kotaku or Polygon, but instead to Zelda Informer, Dungeon or Wiki depending on what exactly I was looking for. If it was more general information, then that's what the likes of GoNintendo are for.

Of course, I could always just go to the company instead of a middleman; most of them are moving towards marketing straight to the consumer rather than the press. Given that most of say, IGN's information comes from summarising things like Nintendo Directs and E3 presentations, or from what's trending on Reddit or Twitter or Youtube, it seems more logical to go straight to the source than through the middleman.

Would this work in all fields? No, stuff that's dangerous or complex (like say, reporting on the war in Syria or what not) tends to need more professional organisations. But if you're after information on games, TV shows, movies, music, celebrity gossip or sports, then to some degree you can pretty much entirely replace the professional media with fan sites and blogs.

It's also why paywalls are going to be a problem even in the short term; anything factual you put behind one is going to end up on the fan run sites and aggregators anyway. If a big site puts something interesting up behind their paywall, then it'll be maybe about ten minutes before someone's ripped the whole thing, stuck it on sites like Youtube and its then been posted across the entire blogosphere.

[manigandham]

Sure, but that's not really professionally produced content then. Wiki's and social sites are just users creating content for themselves, which is a fine system, although most wikis (especially the wikia network) is all financed through advertising anyway so it's the same thing.

Paywalled content is going to need to be more than facts, in fact if it's just facts then most news sources are overkill. Rather its the voice and other in-depth journalism that would demand a premium. In this case though there are pretty powerful copyright protection systems in place that it's not really a worry. The same reason why little youtube players complain about stolen videos but not the big studios.