World of Warcraft as addictive as cocaine? BS!

You just made the point I was trying to make except you did it much better and in less space: /salute

Seriously, while it isn't obvious how, there's money to be made in that sort of thing.

Last year's comicon for example. Tens of thousands of families turned up. The television networks managed to find two or three people who were perhaps as unrepresentative of the familial wholesomeness of the event as you could wish to find - and gave them screen-time. As you can imagine, this gave a whole different impression of the event.

Supporting popular prejudices (however unfounded those prejudices are) is profitable, whether it's in ratings, advertising dollars, or just plain funding (particularly in the case of some research firms).

It's a bit of a subtle trap. Obviously you want to publish or air what your readers/viewers are interested in. If your ratings soar every time you slam World of Warcraft, or Grand Theft Auto or Second Life - and drop every time you say something positive or balanced - there's little economic incentive to do anything other than rake them over the coals for real or imagined problems.

The other side of the coin is that if you don't give the readers what they want, you wind up with no readers. It's a fine line to walk.

Here at Massively we teeter along the line, paying attention to topics and MMOGs and virtual environments that our readers are interested in. Without trying to pander to rudimentary opinions like "X is best. All not-X sucks"

We've got a great audience, really. The majority of our readers are mature, in both attitude and years, reasonable and erudite (though for many, English is not their first language), and there's a great deal of variety in your MMO/VE activities. World of Warcraft players who also do business through Second Life. Second Life users who play EVE or Warhammer or Hello Kitty Online.

Just the richness and breadth of our readers' interests presents an ongoing challenge. But we also know that we'd lose most of you if we just started pandering to you and telling you only what you wanted to hear. Sure, we'd get a lot of *other* readers that way... but are those folks really the ones we want?

tl;dr: We can just suck up to you, and there's actually more money in that, but frankly we're happier with the kinds of readers we have.