From the context of the other two paragraphs, you can narrow down what I meant. Stripped of context it is general, yes.
Not all country code top level domains were free, just a select few. And not everyone used free TLDs, just people with tight budgets who weren’t expecting to make money on their sites, as well as scammers and people who wanted to stay anonymous for other reasons.
I don’t think it’s a given and the dev has a proven track record.
…buuuuuutttt they did move to a much smaller userbase so I wonder how many ads he will need for sustainability.