With the increasing interest of people in profiting from cruelty on the Internet and the failure of platforms such as YouTube in removing contents related to this practice, to recognize who is funding animal suffering is imperative to combat this serious problem for sustainability, conservation, and animal welfare. Here, we investigate how content creators exploit animals to incur profit, by analyzing 411 productions of: A) visible and B) hidden suffering. Categories included A) 1. Hunting-fishing-experiments, 2. Animal crushing, 3. Cruel slaughtering, 4. Animal fights, 5. Cooking/eating animals alive, 6. Staged rescues, and B) 7. Selfies and 8. Wildlife as pets. Across 39 countries, different tools and tactics, from high heels to grenade launchers, were resorted to harm and to expose >96 animal species in nearly 50 h of online animal cruelty content. Monetized by 155 advertisers, 114 videos amassed over US $1,14 million, benefiting 79 channels. ‘Wildlife as pets’ was most profitable and 38 of the identified species are listed in CITES appendices. Model-based insights revealed monetization's link to cruelty categories (especially Category 8, ‘Wildlife as pets’) and creators' gender (i.e., undetermined gender of content creator) parameters. Children were in 61 productions. Removals generated by YouTube correlated with cruelty Category 6 (Staged rescues), proving that the diligence of the platform in taking contents down is paramount for more or less monetization. We propose advertiser-imposed legal standards on social networks to compel content removal and that audience report crimes to police aiming legal penalization of animal cruelty content creators.