[zanny]

I've preached this for years, and its my ongoing pet project, but patronage really is the endgame for information content.

Pretty much any freelance animator online is already using patreon. Writers, artists, and comedians are using it. I'm surprised its taken this long for news companies to start trying it.

Fundamentally, the information created is not scarce. It is knowledge. It deserves to be free. But the work to create the information is scarce. Valuable. Some might even say worthy of compensation.

There are so many ways you can present patronage to your audience. Hell, advertising honestly is a kind of patronage - your viewership translates into third parties valuing your work enough to pay you for it, so their ads can go along for the ride. But on the other extreme, you could be a writer or animator or comic artist who says "next episode costs $XXXX, when I get that much money I'll produce it / release it". And there is an entire range of other options in between those two, and its really stifling how content creators are still so limited in their options.