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.