I've been toying with the idea of setting up a blog/advice site around 4wd/travel/camping etc. I have used blogger in the past for friends to look at. Now thinking of turning the multitude of photos and trip reports in to something a bit more formal, with the possibility of chucking in some affiliate advertising in the future.
All my searches lead to using wordpress.org. But I've also noticed some negativity around this too. What are the alternatives? The simpler, the better!
Wordpress.
If you have no skills/clue then stick to Wix.
I would suggest you use notion - and share the page out as public - then use cloudflare to point the domain name to this notion url. There are no costs for any of these.
Edit: just saw that you want ads on the platform - dont think notion can accept ads - so my suggestion may not work for you.
If all you need to setup is the blogging part of Wordpress, aka your not thinking of installing heaps of plugins to try and create the next Ebay using Wordpress, could be done but I wouldn't recommend it.)
Then just use the hosted version wordpress.com this will allow you basic blogging functionality and you can configure your own domain name using the platform. Plus its hosted so Wordpress themselves take care of updating the platform.
Where as if you self host unless you go for a managed option you will need to take care of software updates.
WP is the biggest ecosystem in the blog space.
Just be careful to not spend ages and thousands to build something that no one is really going to visit… Maybe start off with just social media? A Facebook page/group and Insta and when you see that you get a big following start thinking about investing in a site?