[_69x2]

I think you are confusing patrons with podcast listeners.

What you see on Graphtreon is the number of patrons, meaning podcast listeners who decided to donate to the podcast through Patreon.

I don't know what the average conversion rate is, but I think it's safe to assume that patrons only make up a small percentage of total audience, I'd be surprised if it was higher than 5%.

In fact, it's probably significantly lower than 5%, my guess would be that it's more like 1%.

So, your assumption that it doesn't take more than 2000 listeners before you can pull in a livable wage is wrong, but maybe you meant patrons.

It depends on what your definition of a livable wage is, but my guess would be that you'd probably need an audience of at least 100,000 podcast listeners to make $5000/month on Patreon (assuming 1% conversion rate and an average donation of $5).

Also, it seems to me that you are confused as to how Patreon model works, creators who use Patreon don't put their main content behind a paywall, they simply throw in some extra goodies for patrons.

[slg]

I am very familiar with both podcasts and Patreon. I contribute to multiple podcasts on Patreon. Creators have a lot of freedom in how they setup their Patreon. It might not be the most common setup, but there are certainly some creators that keep almost everything behind the Patreon paywall. In those cases a listener is the same thing as a patron. That model isn't great for exposure and doesn't provide an easy avenue to grow the podcast without other means of promotion, but I have seen it be very successful for creators who already have a niche of fans who will support them. To repeat myself, the viability of the different approaches depends on what metric you are looking to optimize.