Leon Neyfakh singles out 1994 as a turning point for the Internet: “The number of websites grew from 623 at the beginning of the year, according to one study, to more than 10,000 at the end.” He presents an oral history of the period when just “clicking around on things was wildly entertaining, because it was so novel”:
[Michelle] Johnson [first editorial manager of boston.com, website of the Boston Globe]: When we launched boston.com [in the fall of ’95] … [o]ne of the first responses that we got was from some guy in India who was like, “Oh my God, I can get the Red Sox scores in real time!” Of all the stuff we were doing we weren’t expecting people to get that excited about getting sports scores—it hadn’t crossed our minds. We were also focused on a local audience, and here was this guy from halfway around the world who was jumping up and down about getting to read our sports stories.
She continues:
The thing that shocked me the most was how quickly young people moved away from print. I would not have bet anybody that [it would happen] as fast as it did…. I felt a little blindsided…. The term “cannibalize” did come up. I remember people saying we’d cannibalize the print product by giving away stories online. And at the time I was squarely in the camp of, “the Web wants to be free.” It was just the culture back then: You can’t charge people for stuff online. Had I taken the longer view, I would have seen that we were training a generation to expect great stuff for free and that that was going to hurt us. But back then I would have thrown my body on the tracks and said we’d be crazy to charge for this.
The Dish 