There was plenty of amateur content put up for fun before the ad explosion. There were search engines for the content. And there was a lot of academic and technical information.
Then the business types moved and tried to turn the entire web into a strip mall. To some extent they succeeded. Twitchy pointless banners invaded a lot of pages.
To a large extent they failed, because the purveyors of twitchy little banners pretended they have the same user impact as print and TV advertising - and that idea has always been demonstrably wrong.
The problem is that the twitchy little banners created an entire economy of user sharking, which completely fails to understand that the best ads give real value to users - either by providing truly useful leads, or by being beautiful and interesting. Networked web ads are none of the above.
Occasionally you'll see sites that sell space to a narrow targeted niche relevant to readers of those pages. Those tend to do much better.
But the scatter-shot nature of web advertising puts it on the same level as email spam. It's not useful, it's not interesting, it's not beautiful, it's just distracting and annoying. Most of it provides no user benefit at all.
It deserves to die until that changes. If it can't exist without being parasitic on content, then the market needs to kill it off until it works out how to pays its way.
And the content industry needs to get over itself and start producing outstanding, irreplaceable, content that readers genuinely want to pay for. If it can't do that, it needs to die out too.
When commercial content providers (newspapers, magazines, radio and TV etc) moved on to the web, they naturally brought their ad-funded business model along with them.
That's debatable. It's worth remembering that before the Internet, many traditional forms of media had multiple income streams, of which advertising was only one. Would it have been possible to produce TV and radio content based on a subscription-only model? Seemed to have worked out fine for the BBC. Newspapers and magazines would have taken a hit, but if revenue was based on sales alone then it's certainly possible some of those institutions could have survived on this.
In other words, it's not a case of working with zero money it's a case of working with less money.
Subscriptions can work, but usually that's only for small quantities of high-value content, aimed at specialist audiences.
Go to your local stationer and find out how much it would cost for 200-300 sheets of high quality paper, then ask a printer about the cost of printing content on them.
If you're going to reply, at least consider the context in which the comments were made. The original point I was responding to was that subscription models only work in state supported media outlets. My assertion was that Sky proves that subscription models are possible outside those restraints.
Furthermore, even if there was a case where a company was not supported by the law, subscription models can still exist. There are examples online of subscription services for illegal content. One could argue that Usenet subscriptions in the broadband era fall into this category, the chances that people are currently paying a monthly fee to access the discussions is somewhat slim.
That's unfair, and almost flat out wrong. Content and ads pretty much evolved hand in hand. Sure, there was some content up before ads came along, but ads came up almost immediately after. There was also practically no content on the 'net compared to today. The net back then was... almost non-existent. It was a ghost town. You had sites like prodigy and compuserve hosting a large chunk of the 'net and they did have ads. This was in the mid 90s.