I was getting 20,000 unique visits a day yet I was just covering the dedi with that.
ah those were the good old times weren't they?.
as for the OP and the topic that he made my guess would be the uploaders.
i was an uploader and i earned more than 400 euro's a month if i continued i would even had more but now i got a real job :P and hotfile banned me but i still get around 50-80 euro's from the other old files that i uploaded on various of other file hosts. except from hotfile of course.
Depends in the intelligence of the webmaster/uploader.
From my experience, webmasters earn more...but only clever ones.