Jack Conte was in a rut. As one half of indie band Pomplamoose, he'd spent three months working 18-hour days on a new music video. "I knew I was going to upload it to YouTube. I knew it was going to get a million views," says Conte, 31. "And I knew I was going to get $200 [£140] of ad revenue for it. That's the suckiest feeling." Like so many artists online, he says, "I was making art, and making no money."

So, alongside former room-mate Sam Yam, San Francisco-based Conte founded crowdfunding platform Patreon. Launched in 2013, the site is a Kickstarter for creative professionals: but rather than fund specific projects, it lets fans support individual artists - from musicians to illustrators and film-makers. Fans pledge financial support, paid either as a monthly sum or per piece of new content. In return, backers receive exclusive content. (Patreon takes a five per cent cut.) "Within two weeks, I was making about $5,000 per music video," says Conte.

It's not just videos. "Writing is a really popular category. We have writers making a few thousand bucks per article," says Conte. "It doesn't matter if you're doing video, comics, music, writing - people are being paid for putting something online." The goal, he says, is to fund what he calls "the emerging creative class". The service now has more than 20,000 individuals using it for income, including the musician Amanda Palmer, and in 2014, the company raised $15 million in funding led by Index Ventures.

Patreon's target audience, Conte says, is niche creators making a living through their art. "They make enough money to make it themselves; they are not household names, but they are loved in their communities," he explains. "On Kickstarter, you put your hand out and say, 'I want to make a really big thing'," says musician Molly Lewis, who currently makes £1,388 per song on Patreon. "Here, you make the thing first, then you put your hand out." "Having the consistent monthly income from Patreon, and knowing exactly what I'm going to be working on that month, has really balanced out my work life," says Brooklyn-based illustrator Sarah Anderson, 23. Anderson offers four levels of rewards - from $1 for a bi-weekly update to $25 for a portrait.

, which currently raises $6,130 per month. "Knowing that the project is self-sustaining because of the direct support of people who love it is gigantic. Up until things like Patreon, it was practically unheard of."

Patreon isn't without its challenges: in 2015, the site was hacked, with millions of artist and patron emails posted online. ("Nobody's credit-card data was compromised, all tax data was encrypted," says Conte.) Most creators on the site make only a small sum. And other startups tackling the same problem, such as the micropayments company Flattr, haven't reached widespread adoption.

But given the widespread acceptance of crowdfunding, Conte argues, patronage is a natural extension. "It is a classical concept, something that is thousands of years old," he says. "It's how every art we've ever known has been funded: some rich dude with a bag of coins gave some cool-ass artist money to make more cool things. But instead of one rich dude, with technology, everyone can be a patron of the arts."

This article was originally published by WIRED UK