Comment by munk-a
3 days ago
Not at all, a few people pay to make it available as a service to others because they want it to exist. It's like this website - there are no (traditional) ads and most of us have paid nothing to use it. A small expenditure creates a good community for technical discussion that the hosts value existing and for being able to occasionally promote their ventures on.
It wouldn't work like that. Yes, there are some exceptions, but that wouldn't work for the vast majority of sites. The rest of them would end up being Facebook pages or Fandom wikis or similar.
I'm not certain how early you saw the internet - but a lot of people threw up websites hosted on consumer quality computers sitting in the corner of their room. Don't underestimate people.