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That just makes sense though? The legit sites have to pay for, fund, or in some way support the content which does cost money. The piracy sites obviously don’t have that cost so they don’t need as much income.
The piracy sites also pay a lot less in infra, since they rely on the user to store, seed to others, and serve the content to the local users. All that infra is offloaded to the user.
Sorry, what exactly kind of content are we talking about? You know, the one "legit" sites have to pay for but piracy sites don't.
Fun fact: a lot of the content you see on big sites are advertorials, this means some company writes a fluff piece about how their lastest product can solve all your problems, and then pays the site to publish it. In print, you even have the option to have the ad use the same layout, fonts, colors etc. as the real content.
This means a portion of a site is not filled by content that had to be bought, but actually brings them money.
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.
That's some ground-level hanging fruits - do you know any piracy websites the size of Amazon or Netflix? Sure as hell I do not.
Piracy websites are usually pretty limited in scope. Places like some shady porn repos, pirated games and movies, etc. Of course there are some giants like thepiratebay but even they are nowhere as large as the ones you mentioned.
All of these, especially the big players, have high costs of maintenance and advertising. Just like their "legit" counterparts in size.