Earlier quoted context omitted.
The flipside to this is that there are people who will never ever pay money for your content, and ad revenue is the only way to directly capitalize on your popularity among those people. This also means that when your ad revenue disappears, you will NEVER get that revenue back. Your only recourse is to get more popular, as your supporters are already buying your merchandise and donating. It's going to become much mor…
"It's going to become much more difficult to support yourself via creating content if step 1 becomes "be famous"." You don't have to become famous. One of the things I love about Patreon are how some of my obscure things nobody has ever heard of are now providing a low-to-mid-grade middle class lifestyle for people you've probably never heard of. Wander around a bit on https://graphtreon.com/ , and bear in mind a lot…
If my ad revenue tanks, Patreon does not automatically go up, I'm just out my ad revenue for the month. For some artists this is the difference between being able to pay rent or not.