maroonedinhsv
Member
As one of the "old farts" that has been around since the beginning of the web, this has always been the struggle. Many people created websites for the good of the community, with no intention of profiting on its existence. As websites grew in popularity, the costs went up (more storage, more bandwidth, etc). Eventually, popular free websites would be too costly to run without a source of income, so the options were paid membership or ads. For most sites, paid membership just didn't work, because their was always another site promising the same thing for free (or most members more than happy to live with whatever the reduced capabilities of the free membership were). The better path from a financial standpoint was always to build up a user base large enough that it would be difficult for another new site to steal all of your users, then do one of two things - introduce ads, or sell to one of the giant web companies (and let them introduce ads).I miss 2004 when youtube was ad free, iirc I switched to YouTube from a competing video hosting site because of there was no ads and the video data cap was higher than anyone else. It's changed a lot, their feed is garbage too. Around 35-45% of videos they recommend to me are videos I've already watched and no matter how many times I say "Not interested > I've already watched this video" it just persists indefinitely. Been like that for years too.
As I'm sure @WesL can tell you, when it comes to hosting a website, there is no free lunch.