Thats a pretty insightful article - I has always assumed that Patrons that could live off Patreon were concentrated at the top, but I never realized just how few of them there were. It's soured me a bit on Patreon, especially as it garners more comparisons to YouTube's ad related model. To acheive minimum wage on YouTube, you have to earn between 300,000 - 1,000,000 views per month (depending on how much the algorithm likes you). Comparing some of my favorite YouTubers to the data on Graphtreon, it seems to me YouTube is still more lucrative while Patrion does contribute a non-negligible amount of money.
IMO Patreon is better for more niche creators who have a smaller but more passionate audience. Sure, you can make a ton of money off of YT ad revenue if you're pulling in a few million views per video and putting out multiple videos a week, but there are a lot of YT creators who don't pull in those kinds of numbers and can make a lot more via Patreon.
HBomberguy is a favorite of mine - he publishes high-quality, researched, edited videos, an average of once every few weeks, gets 100k-350k views per video, and via Patreon makes $6k/video. There's no way he'd make even close to that much via YouTube.
edit: Nice, you're 'nemothekid' - part of my last name is in your username :D
