A childhood friend has a son who is a huge pop star from YouTube, 14 years old and making $$millions. The dad, (our friend), had to go on sabbatical from his executive level job to chaperone him on tour. The kid has something like 18 million YT subscibers and a similar number on IG. Crazy...
The story in the OP is actually not that surprising or strange if you contemplate the overall size of the internet economy. They have managed to slice off one tiny, almost infinitesimal piece of it. Think of the size of the entire internet economy, (IE), worldwide that did not exist 23 years ago. Sure, there are Gates and Bezos, Facebook and Google but the real story is how much time people throughout the world spend on the web. The $$ that we all spend is freaky enough but the time and energy has an economic cost that is staggering, the amount of lost productivity, % of your life you will have spent on sites like this one and social media, etc., etc...
Economists have ways of attaching monetary values to people's time but the number is so large that mathematicians haven't invented it yet. If the internet was a country, it would dwarf the USA and China together, if properly measured, IMO. And it did not exist as a market force, (or barely did), 23 years ago.
