You don't have to become famous. One of the things I love about Patreon are how some of my obscure things nobody has ever heard of are now providing a low-to-mid-grade middle class lifestyle for people you've probably never heard of.

Wander around a bit on https://graphtreon.com/ , and bear in mind a lot of what you see is hobby work, not attempts to make a living.

And also bear in mind there is no option where anybody ever just wakes up one day, decides "I'm going to make a living as an Internet content provider!" and a thousand people pour out of the woodwork to give them $3 a month right away. The question is not whether Patreon successfully thrusts success on people... the question is whether it enables it.

i.e., if I love Patreon so much why haven't I switched to make a living on it? Well, I have a realistic view of my own "content creation" skills and realize that it's not really an option for me. Patreon isn't going to magically fix that for me.

If my ad revenue tanks, Patreon does not automatically go up, I'm just out my ad revenue for the month. For some artists this is the difference between being able to pay rent or not.

It's already becoming like this for certain forms of media. Videogames, in particular. It's amazing how many things become easier, once you've already gotten notable. Come to think of it, it's been true to some degree, even in the days when media only existed in the form of spoken word and songs.

Are these people clicking ads, though? I doubt it. And if not, you aren't monetizing them directly via that method, either.

Enough so that you can offset the cost of the hobby in many cases, and make a living in that rarest, most desirable of cases.

http://www.theverge.com/2017/4/6/15209220/youtube-partner-pr...

If your channel has 10k views total across all videos, you can monetise the next video from viewer 1.

Or maybe Youtube is just not worth it?