It's more likely that they were inspired by earlier online service providers, like Compuserve and AOL, which were far more dominant in the early to mid-1990s. Keep in mind: even though the Internet has been banging around for a very long time, the web had only been around for a year or two by the time eWorld and MSN went online. That isn't much time for the web to develop, businesses to see it as important, to develop business plans, implement software, and put contracts with third party content providers in place.

(In case you're wondering why I'm placing so much emphasis on the web, noone really knew what would come of the Internet before that. After all, it was predominantly a soup of protocols that had clunky clients which were oriented towards information retrieval, correspondence, and file transfers. Even early versions of the web didn't go far enough beyond that for its future to be certain. But, apparently, it went far enough.)