Why is SNG rake so high?

[DCJ311]

I revisit this topic every once in a while, since it enrages me to think how much I am cheated out of per year in these things, yet I continue to play them because they are the most exciting form of poker to me and I still somehow manage to grind out a small profit.

This summer I played quite a few live WSOP STTs with a winner take all format. The buyin for a LIVE $325 sng was $312+13, for about 4.1% rake. On Pokerstars, the rake on a $315 buyin turbo SNG is $20, for 6.3% rake. This is an absolute joke when you consider the actual manpower/fixed cost that goes into the live tournament.

Yet no one ever complains as the pool of SNG players lowers due to the increasing strength of the games!! Not one online site has taken a chance by reducing the rake just a small bit to see if the volume of SNGs played goes up as a result.

The main issue I have with SNG rake is that it's virtually the same as in a MTT tournament. The Sunday $200+15 tournament takes roughly 12 hours to complete; the $210+15 turbo SNGs take roughly 50 minutes. Shouldn't there be some cost of table/hr ratio here that in this case seems grossly out of proportion?

During the WSOP, a $1000 buyin SNG had $13 rake, yet a $1000 buyin MTT had roughly $100 rake. Makes sense, because of the fixed costs/hr. So why aren't we seeing the same thing in online tournaments?

Furthermore, why does an online site want people playing 6-12 hour long tournaments when they could be playing 8-16x more SNGs during that time? It drives me insane thinking about how ludicrous this is. I have the capacity to play 16 SNGs at once if the games are good, do poker sites really want me to play 16 MTTs instead? Illogical.

The SNG forum obviously has a lot of intelligent minds, perhaps someone can explain to me once and for all why this system doesn't need to be changed.