I partly disagree with this. It's true that there is a crowd of uploaders who do it for profit, but Putlocker/Firedrive discontinued their affiliate system in 2

I partly disagree with this. It's true that there is a crowd of uploaders who do it for profit, but Putlocker/Firedrive discontinued their affiliate system in 2012 and continued to be one of the most popular file hosts (yes, they closed down now but that's because they operated in the uk and had issues). Zippyshare also remains very popular when it doesn't pay uploaders either. Vkontakte is another popular file sharing site in addition to 4shared (but 4shared recently started being very strict to copyrighted files). Argubly one could argue that megaupload was mainly used by non-profit uploaders. It gained popularity with affiliates but afterwards the average person and non-profit uploaders used the website to upload files more than the affiliate users. I believe you had to become a premium member to actually gain access to the rewards feature. Rapidshare died because not only did they combat copyrighted files, they also blocked the ability to share legit files. As pointed out in the comments elsewhere in this thread, they tried to out-Dropbox Dropbox. edit: also, Mediafire before they went all-cloud had no affiliate system and is very popular. And look at Mega.co.nz, a very popular website which is used for movies etc.