Andrea . . . good question. My comparison of the newspaper world (old media) and OER was primarily based on lack of vision of foresight and not necessarily business models. That being said, I think you will see old media start to get the idea that open may indeed be better - if they can drive traffic (and measure) through their pages. As an example, the New York Times released an interesting new tool as part of their online presence called, Time People. It is essentially a social network built into the paper that allows people to follow other readers and have recommendations dropped into their profile for reading later. I see it as a step towards attempting to keep readers at the site (and for driving people there). If I am reading headlines via RSS I am giving the ads on the pages less importance, but if I am at the site, digging through recommended articles then I am increasing my click through.
I guess the same could be said of open educational resources - that the more eyes that travel the content, the greater the likelihood of having someone, who otherwise wouldn't have, decide to take the course for a fee. I'm not sure if that is true and I don't have any data to support that claim.
How we make money is an entirely different question - I don't think that opening access to some courses will cannibalize our market. Until people figure out how to take OER and repackage into degrees from across the web (google might be able to pull that off) we are going to continue to enroll the kinds of numbers (or greater) that we currently have. Paying for access to an instructor and a community for support that add up to a credential is still what people are after. The negative impact of OER may be in the sunk time it takes staff to produce the resources . . . not sure. But if they are designed appropriately, we should be proud to show them off in an open sense.
My questions focus on how we as educators will work to rethink the kinds of environments we use to provide access to our own and other open content providers out there. I see a shift in the willingness for content providers to share - I never thought I would be able to watch full length movies online for free . . . let alone write a review of it and embed it in my own site. That is a major shift. I am just curious if we are paying attention to that shift.
I know I didn't really answer your question, but I tried!
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