“To understand the challenge of getting people to pay for Internet content, imagine trying to sell subscriptions to HBO back in the 1950s. People were still fascinated with the sheer miracle of television. They clustered around their primitive sets to watch the damnedest things (Milton Berle for instance). Before people would pay money for premium content, they had to get so bored with TV that they’d say, ‘Damn it, there’s nothing on I want to watch!’ Yet, they’d also have to be so addicted that it wouldn’t occur to them to turn the machine off. This transition didn’t really occur until a large part of the adult audience consisted of people who had grown up with TV. Folks who met the TV as adults would never have as strong a relationship with it–they had other hobbies–they knew, for example, how to read.

“Why pay a fee for Internet content when a million free sites are just a click away? There’s no incentive until people are too addicted to the Net to turn off their computers, yet are bored with what’s available. In the very long run, addiction and boredom seem as inevitable as death and taxes, and user fees will then be viable, at least in some cases. Customers who pay for some specialty sites may come sooner, but the mainstream is apt to be slow–exactly how slow is hard to predict. A year? Five years? Must it wait until a generation has grown up with the Web? Maybe not, but there is no reason for the transformation to happen on the same rapid time scale that users join the Web or free sites proliferate. Not everything happens in ‘Internet time’ or is destined to explode at 20 percent a month. The timing isn’t driven by technology and how fast we adopt it–it is about shifts in human behavior.”