Patreon has three membership plans for creators, none of which are actually 10%. :) The basic one is 5%, the "pro" one is 8%, and the "premium" one is 12%, which is targeted more at companies/teams than individuals. (It comes with a dedicated account manager and I believe some kind of shipping/fulfillment system for physical merchandise.) Their payment processing fees are also actually lower than what you'd pay Stripe directly for pledges of $3 and under.
Patreon isn't problem-free, but I think they get dinged a little too hard by folks sometimes. It's not very easy to find a competitor that offers comparable value-added services at significantly lower cost.
Online payment system is typical platform business where network effect dominates.
There are multiple competitors for Patreon, but they can't get off the ground because they don't have the users because they don't have the creators because they don't have the users.... You can build much better platform and it's just crickets in the sales because operating costs on smaller userbase are higher. Small competitor might force Patreon to reduce prices a little until they can kill the competition, but it's hard to have stable competitors.
Businesses that already have massive number of customer subscriptions and brand recognition could enter the market.
One example would be DarkCookie with "SummerTime saga", a "dating sim" at around $50,000 US.
Or another example at 769 patrons and $2,287 per month: "Porn Empire is a simulation/management with light RPG elements where you play as an amateur porn producer.
Start small, shoot amateur porn and as you progress, you earn more money, buy better equipment, pick up better girls and train them"
If people really cared they would have signed up. But the proof is in the pudding. What people really care about is totally different from what they say publicly. What they really care about, apparently, if you follow the money, is interactive cartoon porn.
I wonder if Patreon would consider diverting a small amount of the porn money to worthy causes like Linux Journal.
I beg to differ. There's just more competition, and the bar for entering is lower. And so you get a lot of chaff. But there are serious journalists with high standards and integrity out there that thrive on the donation model, such as Timcast. Now there's a guy who actually meets up where it happens! Add to this that often it's not needed to send someone out, because you can always read some random guy's twitter. We don't exactly have less access to news or reporting. The problem is the filtering. But I'm not sad for it. Not one bit! Because it has revealed to us just how things were filtered in the past by the big giants. Not so anymore.
Other than that, you have to remember that there's been a pretty painful phase of adaptation with new and emergent technology. This means a lot of the old bastions have fallen, or are trying to figure out how to cope with the new media reality. Either way tabloids will always sell more than real news, sadly. They also did during the heyday of serious broadsheets, and there's not really any indication that it's going to change in the near future. There are some noble efforts to fight the fake news agenda, that tries to pick apart the rabble of the tabloids, such as Snopes -- until you realise that they're also extremely biased. So in the end, you're left with thinking for yourself, which can be both a blessing and a curse. Probably more of the latter if you believe in UFO's and crystal healing...
I support Timcast because of how refreshing and real his journalism is. I actually had him in mind as an example of a real journalist when I posted the above comment. But it's still going to be an upwards battle, there's a few good ones like Tim, but not nearly enough to replace what we used to call the journalism industry, most of which has turned to mush in past decades.
I'm not sure that nobody wants to pay. There are too many things to pay for. Suppose 50% of the sources of HN are paywalled with a monthly subscription. How many of them one person could be paying for? Not many I guess. With a per post subscription? More but we're not really there. Furthermore it's hard to ask for money before the customer sees the product. How many disappointments before the pay per article model fails?
The search engine and aggregator sites commoditized information, including technical one. That started killing news, online and paper.
I think FOSS has not sufficiently explored the donation model. I'd be keen to donate a decent amount of cash to get some fundamental improvements to Emacs, for example. Lots of developers are relatively well paid and use a lot of free tools.