There are really only a couple problems: consumers have become accustomed to freeloading, and that there's no system in place to enable micropayments for content. Once we figure out a way to enable paying, let's say, $0.01 to watch a video or read a news article, the web will fundamentally change in a positive way.
It isn't "value for value", it's a donation. The most traditional, direct business model ever created involves you not having the content until you pay.
People HATE being nickel and dimed. Exactly zero people want to have to think to themselves "is this news article worth 5 cents?" every time they load a web page.
If you pay for mobile service per GB then you already have this problem.
"Consumers" (a problematic term) need a refrigerator to keep food cold, figuratively speaking. They don't need "content." If money is what people care about, they should get into the refrigerator business. (In China, since that's where it is now.)
The web isn't a money machine. If everybody who wanted to get paid for it, got the hell off it or was starved off it, that also would lead to the positive fundamental change of which you speak. Just sayin'.
https://www.patreon.com/Kurzgesagt - 9,890 patrons - $36,214 per months in donations.
https://www.patreon.com/cgpgrey - 7,719 patrons - $19,439 per video in donations.
Edit: And there's https://www.patreon.com/DeFranco at 14,268 patrons. His revenue is hidden but that's at least around 60k/month if not more.
Median income in the US is ~$42,000/yr last I knew. Call it $4K to make up a bit for benefits and such. There isn't a hard-and-fast way to count because some people hide their total, but there are clearly plural hundreds of people above that line in the top 1000 [1]. There's several more hundred people making poverty-line in most of the US (which as a relative measure, I can't do a precise cut off), and before one starts moralizing about how horrible that is, remember that they are not necessarily doing this as their only job. What may not be enough to live on can still be a very very nicely paying hobby.
You are certainly correct that overall, more money flows through YouTube. I am much less convinced that that's a good thing in general, though. The incentives on YouTube fluctuate a lot, but in general tend to support quantity over quality. In fact as I think about it, I wonder if Patreon is helping prop up YouTube a bit by helping the quality producers resist that; if YouTube banned alternate monetization and tried to survive just on their own quantity-over-quality metrics I wouldn't be surprised they would eventually experience an eat-your-own-seed-corn collapse. I've listened to the YouTube videos of a couple of the people chasing the quantity-over-quality treadmill that YouTube ends up putting them on to stay on top, and it's not a life I'd want or wish on anyone.
Plenty of the video-based ones are in erotic media, too. It's definitely a new and interesting income medium for that genre.
He doesn't list a dollar amount but my guess is that it's at least $20k a month.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Peterson#Other_projects