Another way to estimate upper/lower bounds for hosting videos is by considering the grey market adult video industry. It seems like there are hundreds, if not thousands of websites providing access to video, and from a unit economics perspective I remember reading those advertising CPMs are on the order of $0.01-$0.05 even for the biggest and least illegal websites like the Mindgeek properties. So I would assume the more shadowy websites operate at a budget of less than $0.01 per thousand views in revenue.

I’m assuming their CDNs are just specialised low cost hosting providers as opposed to p2p IoT botnets, but you never know.

I wish someone had the time and motivation to do an investigatory technical deep dive into the infrastructure they use.