The feature we still have that was on the site 10 years ago for free is the Best in Slot feature.
This post explains why we made BiS part of the premium subscription starting this expansion:
Quite a while ago, we got rid of all advertising on the website, since we do not like the ad-supported revenue model. For what our website does, we feel that a small fee is a much better setup. We don’t want to optimize the website for page views, we want to optimize it for usability.