Honest question, how many creators do you support via patreon or similar?
I subscribe to some very niche content creators on YT and am a YT premium subscriber. One of the creators I follow has 200,000+ subscribers and is very open about the fact that without his patreon supporters that his channel would be unsustainable.
This was surprising to me - I (naively?) thought more of my premium subscription would trickle down to my subscription channels and that 200,000 subscribers would be enough to make a channel at least somewhat self-supporting.
I pay for 4 annual substacks, but I don't use patreon.
I generally have a rule where I won't pay for something if it doesn't remove the ads. The podcasts I pay for have private links that have ad-free versions (except for Honestly which I'm on the fence about paying for because of it).
YouTube premium removes ads, but patreon often doesn't.
I think I'd seen some YouTuber with around that many subscribers say they make ~20k/yr? So it's not nothing, but definitely not enough to be full time. The bigger ones with millions of subscribers like MKBHD and such I think do really well (7 figures?), but I'd guess a lot of that is extra stuff like the sponsored deals and merch stores etc.
