It's pretty obvious that media companies are not ok with simply recouping cost plus a reasonable margin but instead all try for a recurring income stream with little recurrent effort to earn it. No amount of profit is enough if more can be had and with the current copyright regime they can legally get away with it too. Plenty of old games are still sold at prices way above zero even when the companies that originally made them have long since stopped existing. So no, digital content is not priced around recouping costs but around maximising profit.

And going back to the original topic, a lot of advertising infested sites on the web still have their content created for free by users and those profiting from the advertisement are merely the middlemen that handle the distribution.