The existence of Patreon and similar services gives me hope that we can one day have a viable way to fund websites besides advertising. It seems like at present, one or two person teams (e.g. small podcasts and YouTube channels) can survive or even thrive on Patreon donations, mid-sized entities (e.g. major podcasts like Serial, most websites) rely on advertising, while large organizations like newspapers use some combination of advertising and subscriptions with mixed success. It would be great if Patreon-style donations could become a major revenue source of the mid-sized content producers as they have for the small.