Going to the "Royal Road" site they mention on their Patreon:

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/26294/he-who-fights-with-m...

It has a "Statistics" drop down. Expanding that out shows:

Total Views : 7,598,887 Average Views : 32,063

Guessing the average views is per chapter, which they seem to have 237 of at the moment.

Looks like they're fairly popular in their area, and have turned that into a good revenue stream.

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Their "Scribble Hub" site is showing 760k views for the content there too:

https://www.scribblehub.com/series/41306/he-who-fights-with-...

there's a lot of these niche creators on patreon like this. I think the key here is that these people have small but really dedicated audiences.

A similar thing that surprised me is 'reaction channels' on youtube. It's often very small youtube channels with say, 10k subscribers, but they have a few hundred paying patreon followers and pull in 3-5k per month just doing tv show reactions.

money laundering route perhaps?

That’s my default answer for anything involving anonymous transfer of assets. Double so when you get a third party to act as the middle man.

I'm not a money laundering expert but I thought the point was to get a bunch of cash, from drug sales or whatever you don't want anybody asking questions about, turned into legitimate-looking income. Income from Patreon might look legit, but how would you funnel your cash into Patreon contributions without putting it in a bank account first (and setting off the very alarms you're trying to avoid)?

Imagine I am in a shady business and want to collect $13000 a month clean on my bank account, without attracting IRS etc. attention. I can have people (or myself) load prepaid MasterCard plastic with dirty cash and subscribe them to my Patreon.

Not implying anyone is doing that, just that it looks possible.

You can distribute it across multiple subscribers. $1k/month cash deposits for 1000 people will raise less questions than $1M/month for one person. That said, whole operation looks rather expensive, there should be much cheaper and easier ways than fake Patreon accounts.

Organizing 1000 people and trusting them with $1000 per month is not as easy as it seems...