> On the other hand this is how you do business in Central/Eastern Europe.
Honestly, I don't see it. This approach you've highlighted is the same one that YouTube took in the early days (excl. the bot accounts) there is nothing except perhaps for lax regulation and enforcement that made it possible in CEE.
Not only Eastern Europe, Crunchyroll started out the same way. At the beginning they were an illegal streaming site with fansub translations, and gradually they transformed into a fully legit anime streaming service.
For example www.cda.pl. Owners, father and son, build OdSiebie.com mega like pirate content sharing website in 2008 and got raided by Police/BSA in 2009. One year was enough to earn so much money to lawyer up and win unwinnable court case :o. With this experience and first class legal team they started another pirate streaming website www.cda.pl with small twist - DMCA submit form (triggering instant reupload of reported content from one of many bot accounts, so no loss for the portal). Progressively paid Premium option started sharing revenue with legit Movie distributors, instead of DMCA you could claim your content and join profit redistribution program. In 2012 they made $10K profit, 2013 $300K, 2014 >$1. Today CDA makes >$1mil legal profit per quarter and is listed on the stock exchange with $80mil capitalization. This is towering over other local options like Netflix and Amazon. They are ranked higher than twitch, netflix or pornhub in traffic and attention.
https://www.marketscreener.com/CDA-S-A-58002347/
Polish source https://technologia.dziennik.pl/internet/artykuly/504361,cda...