Patreon’s building native video hosting for creators to sidestep YouTube

There’s still a cost but Mux, Cloudflare, Vimeo, and other video infra providers continue to make hosting your own video content less painful as time goes by. Patreon has the benefit that there’s a revenue model they can offset the video cost with. Free video hosting of very popular content is always going to be a challenge, economically speaking. Someone’s gotta pay for disk and bandwidth.

100%.

Creators will likely see extra revenue if they make some videos patron-only, at different levels. Some creators will likely get too greedy and lose viewers, while others will probably do fine holding a select few back to attract new patrons.

The bonus for users will be (hopefully) fewer in-video sponsorship ads (I know all about squarespace and nord vpn, thanks), and no algorithms sending you content you don't want. Less discoverable of new content, though. I suppose "click like and subscribe" will turn into "become a patron!", so that's a wash. Hopefully there won't be as much self-censorship, too, because they have another revenue stream if a video gets demonetized. Or maybe they will put the controversial ones on Patreon only.

I'll be interested to see how this turns out. If it becomes competitive, I suspect YouTube will ban Patreon links instead of doing the more sane thing of partnering with them.

It will never happen because any such site that does pop up will be smeared as a Nazi site by the media and Twitter mob

It's a "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" scenario. YouTube already has direct donation mechanisms, so patreon isn't really bringing anything new to the table. Patreon is just as beholden to corporate interests and censorship as YouTube. There's enough creators out there for patreon to make money off of people YouTube banned, but this isn't progress for the internet, just business as usual.