It doesn't work anywhere near as well as you think. Crowdsourcing is worse than the traditional model, for many reasons.
A huge issue with it is that the creative bears all the risks of chargebacks and payment processor issues. Chargebacks can eat up funding tremendously quickly, and can lead to being banned even from the service that manages patronage for you. And using services like paypal is another existential risk; paypal can freeze or ban you. If anything a publisher's check is more stable.
There's also issues with how much earnings can fluctuate for small creators based on whale donors. People who donate large amounts each month can really hurt small creators if they withdraw. Selling books for example kind of limits the impact of any one sale since all are the same price.
Oh, and patron stuff is bad overall for creativity. A lot of it is porn, a lot of it is just rewarding successful people already, and the demands of self-marketing and maintenance take a lot of time away from the artist to make stuff. It's the same with "indie" culture, it wound up being spamming things like harem gamelit or series books, because that's really what the financial system rewards now.
To be fair to 'ddevault (and the reason I'm not arguing the point super strongly), he himself has a Patreon which he uses to support his free-software work.
I would instinctively agree that the model doesn't work super well for authors / musicians / etc., and being a well-known free-software hacker whom people are willing to support is actually pretty unusual, but I don't have data to back this up.
A huge issue with it is that the creative bears all the risks of chargebacks and payment processor issues. Chargebacks can eat up funding tremendously quickly, and can lead to being banned even from the service that manages patronage for you. And using services like paypal is another existential risk; paypal can freeze or ban you. If anything a publisher's check is more stable.
There's also issues with how much earnings can fluctuate for small creators based on whale donors. People who donate large amounts each month can really hurt small creators if they withdraw. Selling books for example kind of limits the impact of any one sale since all are the same price.
Oh, and patron stuff is bad overall for creativity. A lot of it is porn, a lot of it is just rewarding successful people already, and the demands of self-marketing and maintenance take a lot of time away from the artist to make stuff. It's the same with "indie" culture, it wound up being spamming things like harem gamelit or series books, because that's really what the financial system rewards now.
I think eventually it's just going to implode.