It doesn't have to be making money, it can just be saving it. The idea behind many of these protocols is that people with bursty traffic should be able to exchange bandwidth over time for peak heavy traffic during exceptional events.

Be that running an obscure website that gets flash traffic, or pushing out backups you hope you never need, until you need them all at once.

So the question is does your cloud provider end up charging you for your average traffic per year or your peak traffic, and that depends on base rates and overage rates. Even if protocols like this just exert downward pressure on those rate tables, we all win.