I mean the other simpler answer is that monetization technology lagged compared to the internet, and the generation which grew up with it's growth (us) didn't have things like debit-only Mastercard's to even have the theoretical possibility of paying for things online.
Free was a requirement to have any sort of audience. It's still a burden in a lot ways. I suppose there's some version of the future where Amazon builds a microtransaction platform that allows direct end-user billing of the Lambda-time it took to serve your web request. That would be interesting.
I’m old enough to have had a debit card for the entirety of the webs life and I recall things differently:
- Email wasn’t free (particularly in the pre-web days)
- you had to pay for internet usage per phone call (and it used to be expensive before ISPs went mainstream!)
- hosting wasn’t free (Geocities changed this but there were heavy limitations that even in the 90s surfers felt: storage space, ad banners injected into your site, no friendly domain name, etc)
Most of the free stuff was pretty naff. But people didn’t mind because they used that free stuff for doing generally naff things with. There was a certain beauty to it, like walking through a car boot / yard sale you find the occasional gems but nobody had any illusions of greatness.
What happened after was professional businesses making professional services free. That was the game changer. And it put a lot of non-free services out of business.
Free was a requirement to have any sort of audience. It's still a burden in a lot ways. I suppose there's some version of the future where Amazon builds a microtransaction platform that allows direct end-user billing of the Lambda-time it took to serve your web request. That would be interesting.