Not here to play devil advocates but the distribution of pirated content is actually extremely lucrative. They get at least a few dollars per thousand views. I

Not here to play devil advocates but the distribution of pirated content is actually extremely lucrative. They get at least a few dollars per thousand views. It adds up really quickly when any video will quickly get hundreds of thousands of views, multiplied by the number of episodes, multiplied by the number of shows. Pirating content is serious business. It can also be free and makes no money to the site owner but that's usually not how it's done.