> How would you explain the fact that people paid for cable and premium cable channels (e.g. HBO) in the past when free network TV has always been an option?

The issue you're failing to separate out is that you're talking about entertainment with television. Websites are largely not comparable in entertainment value, and most are not entertaining at all. People will pay a lot for entertainment. That's why blogs are worth $... today and Netflix is worth $226 billion. If people would pay so much for eg blogs (or, again, any other comparable content), there'd be a $100 billion company extracting that monthly payment for producing volumes of written content on websites. Some blog network would have actually succeeded and become a global content juggernaut.

Most of the content online is not of high quality and people will not pay for it, or they'll pay so little for it as to be a sad joke.

Which website compares to the joy and value people extracted from Friends, Seinfeld, MASH, Fresh Prince, I Love Lucy, and dozens of other prominent TV shows from the past ~50 years. Much less the even higher production shows like Sopranos or Game of Thrones. There may be a select few and they're billion dollar services like Reddit with huge volumes of low value content. Do millions of people still talk lovingly about some websites from 2006 like they do decades later about I Love Lucy? Hell no they don't, only a tiny niche group of people does that.

People go back and watch movies over and over again for decades. They listen to the same songs/bands/albums regularly for decades.

Does the average person go back and dig up long dead websites and go through them start to finish on Archive.org, like they do old TV shows they enjoyed (Quantum Leap, ALF, Golden Girls, whatever). Hell no they don't, again, only a very very tiny group of people would do such a thing.

Most online text content is not very entertaining, even in the best case scenarios, that's the difference between the concepts.

Is there lots of funny, amusing, entertaining text content on eg Reddit? You bet. And people will pay pennies for it - if at all - because it's of low value compared to high quality, higher production value entertainment. They'll pay what it's worth, a pittance.

Easy - they paid for cable because it was an orange to OTA's apples. You'd only get a few OTA channels, and even then, not all of them would come in clearly. People paid for cable because it offered more channels. Most channels would still show commercials. Relatively few paid for premium channels, but it wasn't because they were commercial free (they were), it was because they offered better content (newest movies), in a time when piracy wasn't nearly as accessible.

Cable channels were also subsidized by advertising. You pay a decent amount of money per month to get access to exclusive content, but that cost still doesn't cover the costs of producing the media. If cable bills were double or triple the price, even without ads, many people probably would have been pushed to "free" TV.

Exclusive content. That's why I pay for HBO anyways.