PopsiclePete nailed it I think. We've always been anti-ad, because ads can really mess up the experience I think. I'm the guy who pays to subscribe to YouTube to avoid having to ever see ads, and we wanted that clean ad-free experience for as much of the WC community as possible, which was one motivator behind SolSector hosting as well.
But there are benefits to having zero financial incentive. Pete's fair-use example is prime among them, and there have certainly been cases where us having no revenue helped us legitimize things. We've looked at several methods like having WC links in our sidebar be part of Amazon's referral program, which would be non-intrusive, but ultimately we've always decided it was better to be able to say we made no money off anything, if case a situation would ever benefit from that. I also think back in the '90s and early '00s we wanted to also be able to avoid any suspicion whatsoever that we were doing the CIC for "the money." Origin hosted files for us for the first couple years, and even that was enough to draw accusations, but being able to point out that we operated the site without any intent or method to generate any profit was a good way of dropping the mic on those conversations. I like the idea of services like Patreon today for struggling artists and content creators to get their projects off the ground, but even if that existed 20 years ago, it wouldn't have been our style.
I really like the idea of the CIC being our personal community center that posts WC news. It's great to be able to freely be over zealous fans, post random non-WC news when we feel like it, or even take up a day's posting with (literal) WC easter eggs. That's just us messing around and having fun - I would never charge anyone for that (including their eyeballs' time scrolling over ads to get to it).
To Dundradal's point, while I do put in quite a few hours here, it seriously takes a team of people to run the site. Even if you don't see their name in the news regularly, everyone is out there running down leads looking for newsworthy material. Kris does a tremendous amount of technical stuff that nobody ever sees to keep the site operating and secure. If I suddenly disappeared, maybe there would be fewer news posts, but if Kris suddenly disappeared, I most certainly could not keep the site online by myself!