Re: YouTube. When your friends are YouTube micro-celebs, who are good at marketing themselves by definition, you're going to have an easier time getting a network effect going around a platform that depends on marketing oneself, than when your friends are open-source programmers, who as a rule are not good at marketing themselves.
Re: Business. They identified a market need and are executing by the book. They built a prototype, with a standard skimming business model, raised some money, hired a team, danced with the tech press, and here we are.
Here's where we tried approaching content creators: https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/737. I actually did a call with Jack and others right when Patreon launched. Key point he made is that content creators get pitches from companies all the time, so already being in that scene is a huge advantage.
http://blog.gittip.com/post/51236581424/open-call-with-centu...