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Anyone checking e-mail on AOL these days will probably be confronted with multiple entreaties to try the company's broadband service, the keystone of America Online's new determination to charge a premium for online information and entertainment.

If there is symbolic meaning to Steve Case's decision to step down as chairman of the world's largest media company this week, it may lie in the message underscored by the insistent marketing: It is time for the online service to start pulling its own weight.

Case, the archetypal Internet visionary, became famous for his grand notions of how the infant online medium would change the world. But even as many of those visions have become reality over the last decade, the online industry is still struggling to turn them into a viable business.

At AOL Time Warner and dozens of other media companies, tolerance for talk of digital revolutions and electronic frontiers has long since worn thin. No longer willing to coddle a not-so-new technology, investors are pressing for Internet companies and the online divisions of media conglomerates to be held to a grown-up standard of profitability.

Analysts note that the self-appointed Internet visionaries at Jean-Marie Messier at Vivendi Universal and Thomas Mittelhoff at Bertelsmann, have already been ousted as their boards acted upon investor unrest.

"We're at the point where media companies are realizing, `We can't subsidize our online operations ad infinitum; they have to start paying their way,'" said Jonathan Gaw, an Internet analyst at the market research firm IDC. "Steve Case clung to the vision and didn't pay enough attention to the practicalities."

Most Internet companies, including AOL, became a lot more practical after the stock boom ended. In many ways, Case's departure is simply the culmination of a process that began when the AOL service began to drag AOL Time Warner's share price down nearly two years ago. AOL's problems are a legacy of its own tradition of giving away easy-to-use discs that quickly gave Internet access to anyone with a computer, modem and telephone line.

For years the online service benefited from the rapid acquisition of customers for its dial-up service, on which it had a healthy profit margin. But more recently the migration of many subscribers to faster broadband services has meant that the company will make less money from each subscriber, unless it can convince them to pay an additional fee for exclusive online access to its content -- in many cases material from other AOL Time Warner properties, like Time magazine and Warner music artists.

But in some important respects, analysts say AOL's problems are also emblematic of the Internet industry as a whole. As a social phenomenon, the Internet has been a huge hit. An ever-growing number of consumers -- 103 million US households, according to Odyssey Research -- use the Internet to e-mail one another and to find information. But few seem willing to pay for anything other than access to their e-mail.

"The Internet transforms the way the world works, that is true," said Harold Vogel, a media analyst and author of Entertainment Industry Economics. "The question is how do you make money on it, and that is still unanswered."
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