Huh? Nexus was funded by CERN.
Newsgrounds was never investor funded.
Yahoo! Directory was just two guys, and you paid to be listed. There were no investors involved.
WebCrawler was a university project. Altavista was a research project.
But sure, if you think that we should start counting from these years you can do that and add a "public funded" era at the beginning.
The mentality of the age was portrayed like this in SV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo
There were companies that were making some money but those were killed or acquired by companies that give their services for free. Google killed the blogs by killing their RSS reader since they were long into making money stage and their analytics probably demonstrated that it is better people search stuff than directly going to the latest blog posts.
It's the same thing everywhere, the whole industry is like that. Uber loses money until there's no longer viable competition then lose less money by jacking up the prices. The tech is very monopolistic, Peter Thiel is right about the tech business.