I'm in the same boat as you and I don't have a solution but I would say that I'd be fine if the web were far, far smaller. Most content on the web is trash. The

I'm in the same boat as you and I don't have a solution but I would say that I'd be fine if the web were far, far smaller. Most content on the web is trash. The information density of most YouTube videos is so low that it would be quicker to read a concise text article on the topic if such a thing existed (it usually doesn't). Gone are the days (perhaps before 2007 or so) when most blogs were labours of love; now they're mostly clickbait to show ads and affiliate links. Maybe a partial solution to paying for it all is to reduce the amount of content being pumped around the internet in the first place. As a side point, many labour-of-love websites start to monetise to sustain the hosting costs. But some of the best blogs I read are flat HTML. The running costs of such websites must be negligible for all but the most heavily trafficked blogs. When my blog got hit by hundreds of views per second over the course of a few hours via reddit, Apache on a Core 2 Duo barely broke a sweat because it was flat HTML. With modern CSS websites can look fantastic with minimal assets and bandwidth. I'm happy to pay €20/month for such a server myself, and donate my content to whoever wishes to read it.