Not to mention the incentives to create a way to distribute (cough pirate) paid content to people who do not want to pay. That would have broken the system from the start. Some software nerd somewhere would've figure that out.
I feel that early on, we should have had the foresight to press the microtransaction option much harder. There could have been a widely adopted standard where you load your browser or UA with money and then individual sites visited could be given permission to debit some amount per page load, hour consumed, or whatever. I would rather pay a few cents to read an article or watch a video than have surveillance capitalism ruin everything for everyone. It's not about the ads, it's about the ecosystem.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Business_m...
Free content drives out paid-for content. It would only take a tiny percentage of sites going ad-supported. All the users would rush to them, the microtransaction sites would see this, and they would soon change their models.
Even in retrospect I'm not sure what monetisation would have been widely accepted in 1990.
I'm sure, however, that we haven't seen how bad it gets on our current track.
Last summer I watched a lot of Tubi, which is a free advertising streaming service which has the lower tier of content that you might see on broadcast TV or cable plus generous helpings of old movies, subprime anime [1], subtitled Italian crime dramas, etc.
The ads started out really polite, with heavy rotation of ads for P&G brands like Dawn and Tide featuring black people cleaning up [2]. None of the personal injury lawyers, prescription drug ads, ads for legal and illegal medicare frauds, etc. I gave my email addresses and they mixed in a light tranche of retargeted ads from brands I'd engaged with long ago and who were famous for using retargeted ads on the web in the day.
The adtech revolution is half about tech and half about brands that take advantage of the new medium and it's certain Tubi is in the honeymoon phase today because they're still willing to lose money. Investors will expect to take profits someday, and by then cable will be gone, broadcast will suffer from neglect [4] and the ads will get worse, much worse.
I think we'll see more businesses centered around running bad ads everywhere, the only respite might be that some platforms like Amazon and Temu get so big that they trap many businesses into using them as their exclusive channel and starve other channels.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juden_Chan but also some good older stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranma_%C2%BD and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accel_World
[2] their own messes
[3] https://www.avclub.com/tubi-success-hasnt-turned-profit-stre...
[4] even a few years ago the kind of normcore people who used to watch broadcast TV would seem to think I was doing some kind of hacking when I put up an antenna to get OTA television
One of my collaborators would say we got seduced by the idea that it wasn't about the money. That is, it was cheap enough that we could go for a while without thinking how to pay for it, then the advertising model looked like an answer.
Early on one would make the comparison to advertising on TV, radio, magazines and such. Little did we know that personalized advertising would lead to something much worse. I mean, Proctor and Gamble, who gave us the soap opera, has been around since 1837. Do any of the big YouTube advertisers like all the fake food companies or the scam supplement subscription companies or Established Titles expect to be around in 2 years?
If people had been thinking about how to pay for it from day one we'd be in a different place.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_such_thing_as_a_free_lunch