Taking your idea further, a publication like Scrye can still publish all their articles for free, but charge for content like price guides, and even incorporate a “trading” and “buying/selling” system into the “featured content” area. By cornering the online marketplace for this level of niche gaming, Scrye could continue to thrive by simply switching their business strategy to make money off of a new service instead of a news subscription. Still, they would keep their fan-base.

Imagine the operational profit which can be made just by cutting out the production and distribution cost. Editorial costs stay similar, although good moderators/editors should be able to toy with the bonus communities bring and quickly update content without having to rely that often on external authors. So even editorial costs can be reduced.

Just an idea: Scrye goes exclusively online and charges for a ‘featured content’ area $19.95/year. The interesting ‘area’ about collectible cards, values etc. Suddenly Scrye has become from a local niche print publication a worldwide international online publication which at the same time is cheaper for the fan than it was before.

Server costs? Guesstimating based on public traffic resources you could easily run Scrye on a $150/month server.

That’s what we call niche online.