Comment by OkayPhysicist

Most things worth doing on the internet are either A) paid for B) garner enough good will that they can be supported via some polite pan-handling or C) cheap enough to operate that it's a perfectly acceptable hobby expense for 1 person in your community.

Streaming services and E-commerce are the classic examples for A. Wikipedia is the quintessential example for B. C includes pretty much all the social outlets: Web forums, a Matrix server, private game servers (public game servers fall under A), blogs, etc.