Fans Pay Direct

A music video with millions of views earned $150 in advertising. It had cost over ten thousand dollars and two maxed-out credit cards. Out of that experience the musician Jack Conte built, in 2013, a mechanism by which fans pay the maker directly every month — and named it Patreon, after the patron. The word from the Renaissance, when the Medici kept artists alive. This map draws the red line of revival from the Ledgers band. In 2017 YouTube added Super Chat and tips began streaming across live broadcasts. The forerunners were in Japan and China — SHOWROOM's gifts (2013), WeChat's «appreciate» button (2015). And year after year, the top of the world's annual Super Chat rankings is occupied by streamers of Hololive, a Japanese VTuber agency (figures from unofficial aggregator sites, stated as such). Substack (2017) put its motive plainly at its founding: a refusal of advertising dependence. Beside the hundred-and-ninety-year river of «the advertiser pays», a narrow stream — the fans pay — has audibly begun to run.