A la carte works remarkably well with Patreon. Personally I support 11 different video, podcast, and writers.

Perhaps that’s the real takeaway: make it easy to do a la carte, and people will.

It works well for Patreon, but Patreon content creator earnings seem to follow the same power law that afflicts much of the economy. Almost nobody makes more than a couple bucks until they have network effects strong enough to fuel orders of magnitude higher earnings outside of Patreon with traditional (annoying) merch/advertising.

That's not to shit on Patreon. I think it's the right idea but still far from effective enough to consider creative funding a "solved problem" yet.

actually it doesn't work as well for patreon as they'd like because these small transactions still cost to much. banks charge you through the nose for them, so they take a share of the profit here.