* https://www.yahoo.com/tech/sony-succeeded-becoming-powerful-...
The only company that actually makes good money from being a content middleman is, somehow, YouTube. I don't know how they do it. YouTube is among the greatest businesses in human history.
In addition to that, whenever users are just starting out, their videos still get ad rolls but the creator doesn't get any money. That's millions of new videos every day that Youtube can monetize until those creators are eligible to collect the checks for themself (if ever).
Also, YouTube does aggressive caching of very old videos that have very few views. You might need to wait 10 seconds for YT to fetch the video from cold storage before watching, but in the grand scheme of things, it's worth it to them.