I’ve visited imgur’s homepage maybe less than a dozen times in my life, but I’ve viewed thousands of photos being hosted on there through the direct link to those files’ hosting address.
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Imgur generates revenue a handful of ways.
First of all, it’s ad supported. You’re right that not every route to an image on imgur results in you landing on a screen that shows ads, but plenty of them do. Folks pay for ads based on traffic, and imgur has a gigantic amount of traffic.
Second, imgur makes money from usage of its API. Essentially, by making itself available as a tool for other applications to use, those applications pay imgur for usage (in much the same way that a web application with many maps might pay Google for use of the Google Maps API).
Third, and I suspect least: imgur offers paid goods and services to end users. You can buy imgur merch. There is even such a thing as an imgur subscription (which removes ads and presumably has other perks).
Now, your question was not just about imgur, but about other hosting sites as well. The answer is that it varies, and really the way it varies is often the only meaningful differentiator between rival platforms. But it’s probably safe to say that they all fall on some mixture of revenue from end users, revenue from intermediate organizations using the technology, and revenue from traffic.
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