What are the economics behind Kodi's streaming?

I understand Kodi, it's a public, open source effort that became a non profit when it needed to raise money. But what about the file sharing sites that give it the content Kodi users access? This isn't peer to peer like torrents where the users carry the storage and bandwidth costs. There are a lot of files being streamed for "free". Why? Who is actually paying for this? Usually free storage and bandwidth is paid for with ads or selling users marketing profiles. What valuable marketing data can a site glean from someone using Kodi? An IP address, my streaming device type and the kind of movies I like? That just doesn't seem that valuable.