In much the same way I used to quiz my grandmother about how she survived the Great Depression, a younger colleague recently asked me what online journalism was like in the 1990s (we started Slate in 1996). As I started to talk about it, I realized that the journalism itself hasn’t changed that much—blah blah social media, blah blah interactives, blah blah longform—but what has changed is the money. There didn’t used to be any. Now there’s a lot.

As an exercise, I made myself two lists: all the sources of revenue I can remember for 1998 digital journalism and all the sources of revenue I can remember for 2014 digital journalism. I’m not exactly sure what they explain, but I suspect it’s a lot.

In 1998, the sources of revenue for online journalism were:

Funding from some rich person



Funding from some rich company that was making a long-shot bet



Banner ads



Really bad subscription schemes



Some lead-generation business (as Jim Ledbetter reminded me)

In 2014, the sources of revenue for digital journalism are: