Economy VS Internet - No more freebies

A few years back it seemed the internet was heaven for content creators, most of the sites were free and everybody who was anybody wanted to be there so they started an internet division.
Most TV stations and newspapers hurried and put a web site up and threw all the content they had in.
After a while websites like the 'New York Times' and others realized no one will pay if they can get it free so they started charging for membership, and later they all started looking for ways where they can show content but prevent the redistribution and downloading of it.
At the same time one of the things everyone measured for the success of a site was how many clicks and how many members it had.
Only later they all realized it doesn't necessary mean revenue and started measuring better.

A different beast were the sites like Youtube, Myspace, Facebook and other user content based sites that gathered members by the millions but still couldn't show much profit.
Every exec seem to think the same way, if I can get millions here looking there has to be a way to make money of the traffic, so they used banners and ads, also to be disillusioned that people learned to just not look at the sides and at the top/bottom because they were trained to ignore those parts.

The problem seems to be that people gotten so used to free internet content that even though they like and appreciate the content, as soon as the site asks for 5$ they just move away and look for a different site. We can't seem to avoid feeling screwed when someone asks for money for something that we used to get for free.
It never ceases to amaze me how we can freely pay 20$ for 2 people going to a movie and having popcorn and soda and we can't imagine paying for good quality content we get hours and hours of fun per month from.

To this day all the big execs keep on dreaming and fantasizing about being bought for millions by Google or Microsoft so they kept investing time and money in creating sites, and we still see several success stories like twitter and others who put more fuel in the dream of making it big.

All this was true until those darn wall street brokers and bankers drove the economy down the toilette, and now it seems everyday you hear about another site closing down or turning into members only.
It seems the dream is fading, and it seems that in a year or two everything worthwhile on the internet will be on premium paying service and we will have to give up the notion that we are entitled to anything good for free.
Some people will adjust but a lot of people will just abandon the user content sites and the "communities" cause it seems we can pay for tangible things but heaven forbid we pay for web stuff.
It was bound to happen some day but I hoped we still had a few more years.