[bot347851834]

I agree with your general point: people generally donate/buy/subscribe much more if there's a benefit tied to it.

On the other hand, I'd like to point out that Twitch is still losing money so I wouldn't really call their business model "very viable". I'd say it's viable for the content creators, because there's very little risk in trying out Twitch streaming, sure the chances of making it big are insanely small but the worst case scenario is losing time and a relatively small amount of money on a PC setup + microphone and camera.

Patreon is a different beast but there's a caveat here as well. I don't have numbers so this is just my PoV but I'd guess that the vast majority of creators that use Patreon aren't hosting, sharing or creating mainly on Patreon. They're called YouTubers, streamers, bloggers for a reason. Sure they may share BtS or some other kind of additional content but it's not their main platform. So while the Patreon business model works it's not really comparable to Twitch or any other platform where you actually start and continue to create content and also get paid by.

[jerrre]

It's important to make the distinction between:

- Twitch is losing money because the costs of running the platform are higher then the revenue

- Twitch is losing money because they're aggressively investing in growth

if you want to know about the viability of the concept, I'm not sure which one it is, video streaming and small payment processing could both be quite costly