Modern patronage offers artists a new way to earn a living
Crowdfunding platforms can bring in six-figure incomes, but there’s a catch
By Josh Spero
As a clip from Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins plays, an American voice says tartly: “Say what you want about old Uncle Walt, but he was a capitalist . . . [Yet Mary Poppins] is the only Disney-era movie which is at least socialism-curious.”
Lindsay Ellis’s video essay The Revisionist World of Disney: Mary Poppins, Walt Disney and Saving Mr Banks, has been viewed some 230,000 times on YouTube since its release in October.
Ms Ellis, who is a cultural critic, could not have made the video — which edits footage from Hollywood movies into a narrative about Disney’s shaping of its reputation — without help from her friends: all 2,861 of them. That is the number of Ms Ellis’s supporters giving $2 or more per video. She crowdfunds her work through Patreon, a website where patrons and fans support musicians, authors, artists and filmmakers with small monthly donations. (In Patreon’s jargon, the site “powers membership businesses for creators”.)
Ms Ellis found that depending on ad revenue to make her essays meant, as she wrote, that: “it was all about how much you could get out, how fast — which is a lot of why I’m not…
