@DannyO_0x98,
... gated communities. If the gated community is worse than the outside world, users will increasingly want to get out. If the gated community is better than the outside world, users will increasingly want to get in. The problem with the AOL gated community, was that the outside web was becoming increasingly more appealing - in terms of content and user experience - than its walled garden. That is why the AOL ecosystem eventually collapsed - or became much reduced. The reason why the iOS gated community keeps growing and increasing in appeal, is because it provides an increasingly better user experience, and some content which cannot be found on the web. As long as the iOS gated community experience continues to widen with respect to the rest of the web, the more secure will be the iOS ecosystem. The same applies to all other proprietary ecosystems.
Now I do not understand this anti-walled garden mentality by bloggers. Every business aspires to establish and grow its walled garden, because all businesses try to acquire and keep their customers, and have them continue to buy stuff from them - and not their competitors. This has been the case from the beginning of commerce. Having an ecosystem in which people pay for stuff - including the news - leads to a healthy economy, and serves the interests of everyone - including bloggers, because bloggers' content will gain value, and will allow bloggers to make more money. In fact as it stands now, proprietary walled gardens are news content producers' best hope of making money on the Internet, because the walled garden eliminating effect of the web makes this extremely difficult to do.
To make money in just about every business, requires you to establish a wall garden of some sort. Even Google has a walled garden - in the way its search engine (and other services) coalesce people, and direct them to other Google services and ads across the web.
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