You're not paying for access though. You're paying for curation. Access to any given site is free (ignoring the cost of internet access itself) assuming you know the URL. What is not free is someone taking your query and finding sites that might be what you want. You pay in currency or attention. Take your pick.

We all need to think about paying for the internet because literally none of it is free. Not even the hobby blog on a random desktop in someone's basement. It still costs them that bit more in electricity. If no one will pay then we all deserve to drown in ads because that's what we say we wanted with our non-dollars.