When I first got involved with the online world back in 1984, paying for services was what you did. You had to pay for the phone call (usually a long distance call) to dial up to a bulletin board service, and once you got there, you typically had to pay for a membership to be able to access the information on their system.
Then the World Wide Web was born and so was the era of getting almost all information for free. There were companies everywhere jumping onto the give-it-all-away-free bandwagon. Money was being generated in huge sums from advertisers looking to cash-in on the massive traffic free information generated.