Do you think that Amazon gets its content (movies on Prime video) for free? Or do you think that piracy sites pay for their content (stolen movies on torrent sites)?
Edit: To answer you more directly, YouTube pays creators a cut of the ad revenue, and Amazon/Netflix pay the movie/show creators through licensing deals.
It’s definitely instance dependent. I run the servers for my instance at the closest Hetzner data center to myself (west coast USA) for latency reduction and over-size/engineer it for better perf.
My instance is open for registration too, if anybody reading here would find that useful.