Hmm. There have been other small startups that have tried this, but nothing has really stuck. It seems pretty exclusive too. How can a webmaster of a small independent blog chose to participate?

I'm kinda weary of this entire model. I was really hoping Patreon would do more to disrupt the ad model than anything else and wrote about it a while back:

https://penguindreams.org/blog/how-patreon-is-disrupting-you...

...and it's made an impact for sure, but even now Google seems to want to cut Patreon out of their services (you have to have a minimum number of subscribers to add a Patreon button to new videos).

Flattr was another concept in this space that didn't really pan out either.