Comment by xacky
1 day ago
CD ROM encyclopedias were only really viable when dial up speeds limited the amount of multimedia content on the internet. Both Microsoft and Britannica were victims of internet encyclopedias. And now static internet based encyclopedias are themselves under threat of personalised AI content as well. The pursuit of knowledge keeps changing what knowledge itself looks like.
Britannica actually had a great website during the dot com era - hyperlinked, very browsable, and definitely had that semi-addictive "rabbithole" quality.
The hurt themselves badly by imposing a really annoying paywall just as Wikipedia was beginning to take off. A hybrid model with tiered access (maybe even a limited ad-supported free tier) might well have kept them on top - instead, they offered only a single expensive annual plan priced to compete with the paper or CD editions.
Tangentially, my hot take is that the rise of paywalls on news sites in the mid-2010s led to the growth of misinformation.