They can't just randomly decide to "demonetize" thousands of users. Patreon has to be fair, as it depends on people using their service. Youtube doesn't have this incentive, it relies on advertising money.
If the advertisers don't like some videos, they have the leverage to demand their exclusion and demonetization.
This is the fundamental difference: youtube is paid by advertisers, patreon is paid by transaction fees.
They can and have, but it seems happen a lot less. This is an instance where the shades of gray are important.
Furthermore you have to consider the non-binary nature of being demonetized. Youtube may demonetize only 50% of your videos, leaving your channel active but severely impacting the predictability of your income. Patreon provides stability and therefore a sense of security that creators are desperately looking for. You might lose significant income seemingly at random because your neighbor turned up their radio a little bit too loud and triggered ContentID, but so far Patreon isn't taking away creators' income for chickenshit stuff like that.
Not really. Patreon is just as arbitrary and widespread on sudden suspensions of entire accounts (with 100% of a creator's revenue going with it) based on capricious criteria as YouTube is. Patreon has been absolutely burning credibility with creators over the last twelve months.
All these anti-Patreon comments in a row and nobody's given any sort of non-weasel wordy statement.
The only thing I can find is that they removed adult content. Presumably because they use Stripe and Paypal to process payments and both of those are very hair-trigger when it comes to payments for adult content, which are deemed "High Risk" by the underlying payment processors.
So essentially Patreon's bannings (unless anyone has any further information) are a technical and customer service issue. They could probably process adult content through a high risk processor but that would mean adult content creators get less money per pledged dollar due to the higher transaction fees
Frankly I think that's a load of shit. I've not seen or hear of patreon cracking down on anything except for fringe (in an objective sense) political content or pornography.
I'm sure creators of such content are much aggrieved, but compared to the scope of the demonetization on youtube, it amounts to approximately jack shit. How many times has Patreon kicked CodysLab or TheReportOfTheWeek off for non-political non-sexual content? I've not heard of anybody kicked off Patreon for profanity or any similarly chickenshit reasons youtube regularly demonetizes people for.
Sure, but then you can post a new video on YouTube that says "hey everyone Patreon banned me, please start supporting me on patreon rival". If YouTube bans you, you lose your whole audience.