I really don’t recall paywalls in the mid 90s beside porn. Back then nobody trusted using credit cards online. It wasn’t really until Amazon came along that people started really considering the idea.

This was really early on - pre-1999. The paywall thing was part of a lot of companies ploy to get paid for the content on their site - it lead up to the Dot-Com bubble burst.

I remember getting Encyclopedias on disk/disc. It took a long time for encyclopedias to realize their days were numbered and to even embrace the Web. They were so used to the model of selling book sets that were immediately outdated once you bought them.

Back in the early days, online encyclopedia websites were basically media-less versions of the same content as on the disc - but videos were rare because the bandwidth required.

Funny thing is my previous employer actually got into business by selling load-balancing devices to the porn industry in the early days of the internet - back then you needed fancy equipment to balance site visitors between multiple servers to handle the demand because hosting video was quite resource intensive over 20 years ago lol. Then after load balancing, data storage became their next big venture - targeting the same clients haha