I was one of the early Demon sign-ups, having seen cliff stanford promote it on the CIX bulletin board. I was around the 300th user in aug 1992. Demon had a 64K leased line connection to the US. Dialing into London using a 9600 modem cost an absolute fortune etc.
This was when you had to use KA9Q (which was fundamentally an amateur ham radio program) under DOS to access it on a PC. there were no websites, it was all email,FTP and usenet news. and a very basic chatnet that I forget the name of right now.
Those first 10 years or so where glorious as it really was frontier territory, every novel thing was great to experience for the first time.
But I guess it's like most things, once people get into monetising, 90% of stuff goes by the way, and you are left with the stuff all the money has been thrown at.
But to be fair, a lot of money has been thrown at stuff that remained non-monitised for years and years whilst trying to find a way to do so. Think of whatsapp, for a long time now that's been the default go-to app that has most enabled people to communicate 1-2-1, first messaging then audio and then video calling, all for no charge. And of course it is the go to place for family groups or lads weekends away etc to have group chat. It's been so popular, it's killed tradtional text messaging and forced all the telcoms companies to entirely re-evaluate their product pricing (who these days DOESN'T have unlimited txts as part of their plan ?...of which you probably only use a dozen or so a month).
And people go to youtube exactly because it is a vast repository of information. When I was recently tasked with building a gate, it was youtube videos I watched. Want to educate yourself on personal finance and pensions ?....youtube. Want to know how to open up a particular lenovo laptop ?...youtube. Want to do karaoke?... youtube. Yeah being interrupted now and again by ads is frustrating as hell.
However it is true that the enormity of possibilities that I saw back in 1992, has fundamentally percolated down to all the ways it can be monitised.
But I guess it is worth noting that even in August 1992, Demon was charging a tenner-a-month for internet access, so from it's very beginnings it's been about monitisaton.