No. Source: am a little guy. If you remember the early days of the Web, most sites then were small, free, and ad-free to boot. I'm still running the same personal/hobby web site I've had since 2000, still out of my own pocket, still without ads. The costs have fallen over time even as I've added much more content and switched to a VPS from a shared host.
Things like Brave enable you to pay publishers using micropayments. See <a href="https://brave.com/" rel="nofollow">https://brave.com/</a><p>It's a very ambitious new feature that they are piloting for now, but I expect this to become the norm when Bitcoin finally hits mass adoption. Also:<p>- <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)</a><p>- <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropayment" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropayment</a>
If you really want to do a thing, you do that thing. The ecosystem changes, you adapt.<p>I run my sites on free hosting (Blogger). I would like to more effectively monetize them and I am working on that, but I write for reasons other than money.<p>It may kill the projects that are intended to be easy money. I suspect a lot of those are sort of low value anyway. If that suspicion is fairly accurate, it won't remove much of value from the system.<p>Also, Patreon is working for some "little guys." (shrug)