I've seen a lot of people discovering that Patreon-model support can be way more successful for them than ad support. People don't like to pay for free shit - in the age of Zero Marginal Cost, paying for digital goods always makes me feel like a bit of a sucker, but I suck it up and do it because I don't want to break the incentive structure by not rewarding the creator for their work. And I do want the creator to be rewarded.
Divorcing the two - giving out free stuff, and also providing a way to directly toss someone a continuing stream of money to help them make this stuff based on how much I value making that happen - would seem to be the perfect compromise.
Charging for that seems like it could theoretically work, though the key would be that you'd have to A: have a solid audience in mind who'd be likely to consider decent curation valuable enough to pay for and B: be extremely good at selecting resources to show people, to the point there's no way in hell they could find all the stuff shown off themselves.
It'd be a challenge, but I think it could be possible. Hell, I think something like this could probably work quite well in the SEO or digital marketing world, just because of how much bullshit there is online and how hard it can be to find the good stuff.