Do these major pools earn A LOT of money ? What is the monthly range of benefits they have ? [0;$1000] ? [$1000;$5000] ? [$10000;$20000] ?
(I'm talking about mining pools owners, not miners)
Yes. I'll use AntPool and pretend everyone mines PPLNS, which is the easiest to calculate and has less variance on the amount the pool makes. AntPool keeps the tx fee on PPNLS, and doesn't take extra fees after that. In the last month, they found 699 blocks. The average tx fees paid every day according to blockchain.info is around 60 BTC, but considering they SPV mine, I'll use 50 BTC for my calculation. 50BTC/144blocks = ~0.347
BTC/block.
0.347
BTC times 699 = 242.553
BTC. Preev rates gives me 147,700$ USD. If your thinking of running a pool to make easy money, don't even bother imo.