It was so popular. I tried googling this and I did find some tid bits such as this site, but I don’t understand from there why YL would have closed…and from there is an alternate board that was opened after the main URL and place closed down, but even searching in there a bit, I couldn’t find a story as to why they would have discontinued the main, original site.
Does anybody know at all?
Yeah, I saw that. It’s the link I have above, actually. 
I just don’t see how that explains why it shut down, or if it does, I don’t understand it.
Quoted from the posted link
Mainly cost.
Well, if your provider gives you 5GB of bandwidth per month free, with each GB over costing you $1.00, and you’re using 3GB per day, that translates into 93 GB per month for a 31 day month.
So you’re paying your provider an additional $1000 or so per year for having your site on the net. If I remember correctly, Yesterdayland had no ad content, therefore, it was more a “labor of love” for the creator.
It got to the point where his bandwidth cost became greater than he could take and he had to take the site down. That’s what it seems like to me.
Is there anything legally sound behind the idea that copyright infringement is legal if he doesn’t have ads?
Not really. Copyright infringement is copyright infringement, regardless of whether the site is for-profit or not.
Robin
Yes, but I thought that the link was talking about the archive of YL, not the site itself. It seemed like he was talking about having it on his archives and the reasons why he couldn’t continue it , not why YL went offline in that quote.
From the same site.
I would guess that cost is also why the original site closed down.
Okay…Now I understand. 
Thank you.
I don’t think this is the whole story - using material in making money or running a business is a consideration of the court in a Fair Use hearing. Thus it may act to the favour of the site and result in a ruling that no copyright infringement has taken place. There is often no hard and fast guideline as to “this is copyright infringement” and “this is Fair Use”, but there are precedents and general guidelines. Others include the market impact, the availability and distribution, and the “replacement” capability of the copied work.
And it’s also a consideration in a decision to sue, of course. Copyright violation is a civil, not a criminal matter, so you won’t get in trouble unless an owner decides to sue (or at least considers it). So-if you’re not using your material in your own business, and don’t plan on it, and the guy who’s building the website isn’t making money off it, then what’s your motivation to sue?
The big risk there is that the owner will decide to open a business venture selling that content, and will see you as unfair competition …
Two things happened to the yesterdayland mirror at elsewhere.org. First, it was too expensive for me to host it. This led me to shut it down and put up a notice that said I couldn’t host the archive interactively, but I could offer a compressed archive of all the pages, like a zip file. This caused a ton of people to write me helpfully letting me know that if I put ads on the site, I could probably make enough money to pay for the hosting costs. So I added the “no, I can’t put ads on it” line.
And then one of yesterdayland’s founders wrote to me asking me to remove the link to the archive file, since the founders had plans to open a new site with the old content, and he didn’t want potential competitors having that easy access to the content. So I removed the link to the archive file. The yesterdayland founder thanked me for keeping my archive up as long as I did.
I still get a ton of hits to the page I set up which links to the appropriate pages at The Internet Archive. And I still get people frequently asking me if they can have a copy of the archive I created, or if I’ll send them the scripts I wrote when I was making the archive. (No, they can’t, and I don’t have the scripts any more, so no.)
I wasn’t trying to justify my copyright infringement by not advertising on it. I just felt that operating an archival mirror at a loss was more morally defensible than trying to make money from it. Both are technically wrong, but absent any way to contact the site’s original owners, I took the “easier to ask for forgiveness than permission” approach, and took the path I thought most likely to get me forgiveness. And it seems to have worked.
As far as I know, the reason that Yesterdayland closed in the first place is that they ran out of money.