No, you've got it backwards. 'your creators'? Are you affiliated with this type of payment system? I'm in the top 100 music creators worldwide on Patreon, so I

No, you've got it backwards. 'your creators'? Are you affiliated with this type of payment system? I'm in the top 100 music creators worldwide on Patreon, so I figure my observations are salient: it's working for me. I only have patrons. There's a set of tiers that are all voluntary, and a one dollar and two dollar tier that are very popular because people want to be doing something, especially when they have nothing and I'm helping them out. In my experience there are two kinds of 'whales': randomly appearing ones who throw money commensurate to THEIR resources (which will appear like a large sum to me), and the ones who want to throw money to get me to do something specific, and they have demands and often go away again if I don't comply. I enjoy the former and am not really interested in the latter. It's not that I'm mad at them, but if their ideas were that great they would be me… the reason I do as well as I do on Patreon with zero 'extra' and zero 'customers' is because I've got a vision and I'm executing on it. I'm not there to take requests, I'm there to show people something they have not seen, and also to give free opensource tools by way of executing on that vision. I'm not at all sure the 'people who shell out 1K a year because they believe in the mission' exist. Can't prove it by me, I don't have any of those. I do think there are people out there steering indie media figures politically in that way, but I don't think that counts, I think it's money laundering and a backchannel way of funding influencers to deliver specific messages. That's far from philanthropy, that's business (in the form of politics, usually, but probably there are examples that are more directly just business)