The first thing I want to say is that there are plenty of high quality MUDs out there that are run on a non commercial basis. Now that’s out of the way, I believe that were more MUDs to go commercial, even on a relatively modest scale, it would benefit the MUD community as a whole.
As I have said before, I believe that MUDs offer unique gameplay opportunities beyond being simply a free alternative to World of Warcraft. There are already plenty of MUDs that people pay to play and I am certain there are many more currently free that are of sufficient quality that their players would support them financially, whether through a regular subscription or microtransactions.
The costs associated with running a MUD these days are fairly low. Hosting is cheaper than ever with a VPS from $20 a month capable of hosting multiple game servers and websites. However as the internet gets bigger and online games become more popular it is increasingly more costly to promote and market MUDs, particularly to new players. MUDs are not sexy any more and they dont get much coverage in the wider gaming community so we have to rely on word of mouth to attract new players, or try and target existing players through listings or rankings on MUD community websites.
While there are many free options for promoting MUDs, an effective marketing campaign to reach beyond the existing MUD community costs money. This is where I believe many currently free MUDs could best spend the extra revenue were they to commercialise. Increasing market share will always be important to individual MUDs, however with online gaming more popular than ever we need to do far more to increase the size of the market by advertising outside the existing MUD community.
More revenue for individual games means more marketing spend which means more new players discover MUDs, and that is a good thing for the whole of the MUD community.
bcdev.design.blog 
I agree with you, and have found that putting the finances in to promote the mud has (almost) always worked out for us.
We run on a donation system, and have a really good community of players that not only provide enough money to cover the relevant costs, but when we have extra, we save it up to promote the mud. In doing so.. we tend to get new players, thus new donators and so the cycle continues.
Whilst many sites do charge a lot for advertising, there are a few good ones out there that target the sort of people that used to play table top games. I find they tend to get the best results, much more so than sites that typically have a lot of graphical gamers.
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