[rcthompson]

If Patreon was doing nothing but a processing payments, I would agree with you. But it's also a platform for delivering the content that patrons are paying for, providing a space for discussion among patrons and creators, and other features that facilitate building a community. I have no idea if the actual costs of developing and maintaining that infrastructure actually approach 5% of total patron contributions, but I find it acceptable that 95 cents of my dollar goes to the creator and 5 cents goes to maintaining the infrastructure that makes the whole thing possible.

Yes, you could technically use Patreon as nothing more than a payment processor by hosting all your stuff elsewhere and just linking to it from Patreon. But you still have to pay for that hosting, either directly or indirectly via ads. And part of the point of Patreon is to move away from ad-supported funding models. Of course, you currently have no choice but to use external hosting for some types of content, like videos, that Patreon can't host directly. But even then you still get all the community-building benefits of Patreon (and with YouTube comments being notoriously bad, providing a separate comment section might be a significant value-add). I wouldn't be surprised if Patreon added video hosting in some form in the future, probably via a partnership as they have done with streaming video.