After being relatively static from September 2018 to February 2019 (about 34% growth in pledges in 18 months including a 20% drop in September 2019) Patreon pledges rose another 37% in March, April, May, and June. A few individual creators I follow have gained a few pledges in that period, so its not just the 39% rise in creators in the same period.
The subscription-with-back-catalogue model has its problems, especially the way it turns creators from creators of property to day labourers, but I think it is what will replace the ads, propaganda, and surveillance model which has been dead for years unless your name is Alphabet or Facebook (what will replace investor storytime- conning investors into lending you money on the belief that somehow you will pay back ten times as much with advertising or selling out to a bigger company- is not so clear to me, although that is the model that say YouTube or Twitter runs on).
Edit: and humh, behind the scenes there are still creators griping about
broken features and sudden changes- apparently the patron manager, for tracking who is owed what reward, is broken. But enough users still trust them, and they have an excellent business model aside from
their big debt to venture capital firms that may think they have bought a gold mine rather than, well, a financial services firm for small businesses.