I'm still confused as how Steemit as a platform makes money. If they're hosting all this content we produce and paying the contributers how do they make money?
I guess at some point more ways to monitize the platform will come in, not too keen on excessive advertising though
They aren't hosting all this content. They host the text, but the content is hosted somewhere else. Even the images you copy/paste here are not hosted at steemit.com. If you look at the actual URL for the images, it's steemitimages.com, which is a separate entity. The only part of the content which is saved to the blockchain is the text of the URL which is linked to it.