Video streaming is not cheap. Petabytes and petabytes of data transferred, stored, streaming, networked, etc., etc. YouTube is already barely profitable and only from pissing off their audience and streamers.

A comparison to Patreon isn’t fair at all because they have almost no infrastructure to speak of. What do they actually do? Host a web site with some forum software on it? Handle subscriptions and emails, with a light bit of payment handling? Really?