For some reason, blaming sex workers for "starting" the rent seeking behavior of corporations doesn't pass the smell test for me. After all porn magazines have had subscriptions since before the internet.
I had a sales guy at my employer tell me excitedly that he and a client were inventing a new thing for us to support on their website, selling a book before it was even finished, one chapter at a time! He was crestfallen when I told him that Charles Dickens had done it in the 1830s, and that I learned Ruby on Rails from a book published that way by Pragmatic Programmers around 2005.
I don’t think that’s what the article was saying. She was a pioneer in digital media and controlled her work without needing publishers or promoters who typically exploit women in that industry
It's also just wrong that it was innovative. The Wall Street Journal website set up a paywall in the same year, and many other smaller sites probably did as well.
As you say, the idea of subscribing for content goes back hundreds of years.
