That doesn ' t mean that Nintendo AND YouTube AND The Game Grumps or whoever don ' t all make money . I ' m digging into it right now to find the exact legality , but . Like you pointed out , they have 100 mario maker videos . Between OOT and WW they probably have 200 Zelda videos , and Pokemon Fire Red hit 120 . Many of these videos have a million views . So let ' s set a conservative estimate of a hundred million views total . Each video has a commercial before it . That means youtube played one hundred million commercials JUST on Nintendo Game Grumps content . Compound the number of other popular LetsPlay channels and it ' s even bigger . If there ' s a hundred streamers comparably popular to GG , that ' s one billion freaking commercials . YouTube ain ' t a charity , who would stream out THAT much content and not have a method to profit on it ? And once that money is in YouTube ' s hands , they can do whatever they want with it , so presumably a chunk is turned over to Dan and Arin .