[makeitdouble]

> It could be premium content, premium services, exclusive engagement with your fans, merchandising

To address the elephant in the room, except for "premium content", you're asking to pay for something the users didn't come for and most probably don't want.

So if you're not into mild grifting, the only way your content is directly monetized is paywalls, and that's an utterly complicated business as you need to show enough to entice, but not too much, while dealing with freebooting and custome support. It can be alleviated by joining a paywalled community like Nebula's, but it comes with it's own issues.

As you point out it's not impossible by any mean, it's just a huge PITA that will make no business sense for most creators compared to ad ridden platforms.