I strongly disagree. I used to work on a MUD, the monthly run costs for that MUD came to $60. The MUD was free for anyone to play on - it had a website and forums and a server application to connect to via telnet. The cost for this came out of the fact that someone, somewhere needed to keep some servers running, and we needed to keep DNS working, the name registered... all of these ended up requiring three dedicated boxes which we got at a long term discounted rate because we knew a guy in a server farm where we could park our boxes.
Once upon a time it was a similar question if you wanted to run a hobbyist website, you needed a dedicated box somewhere or maybe to fork out 15/mo for some space on a shared host.
Now-a-days that MUD could easily run on the smallest cloud instance you could find with one less server even for a total of 10/mo - if you want to run a blog and tell the world about your intense interest in widget manufacturing there are cheap ways to host it - if the content is standard enough you might even be able to cut down the price to 10-20/yr.
It used to be that if you were so passionate about a topic you thought there needed to be a website about it then... you'd start it and host it yourself, it'd be an incidental cost that you'd just eat - then the mentality shifted to the assumption that your hosting of this thing should be profitable to you - you should get paid for maintaining such a site!
That's the real problem, people expect other people to pay for shit that nobody would pay for - since no one steps up to the "so reasonable" 10/mo subscription then ads are injected to make up for the "loss". If your site isn't valuable enough to get subscribers that doesn't mean it shouldn't exist, it just means that you should put up a donation page and treat any money you get out as an unbelievably strong endorsement of your decision to fund the existence of your little corner of the internet.