Getting paid on the Internet, a place where many people only recently became OK with putting their credit card numbers, is no easy task. This is especially true for independent artists and creators. Zach Weinersmith, creator of the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC), is particularly tired of the ebb and flow of advertising dollars, not to mention the quality of ads on his site. Luckily, he’s found a new hope in Patreon, a funding site that lets his fans pay him on a subscription basis.

“[Ads] are a stressful way to make your living,” Weinersmith told Ars. Ads are volatile—January’s ad sales might be “20 to 30 percent of what I made in December,” Weinersmith says. While his site might serve 1.5 million ads in a day, he doesn’t have complete quality control over the types of ads. He’d love to take money from sites peddling Russian brides, he says, but the quality hit is palpable.

Not only are ads stressful, but they’re increasingly ineffective, Weinersmith says. Approximately 30 percent of his audience, which he says skews tech-savvy, block his ads completely, according to discrepancies from what his advertising partners report and what his own site analytics show.

So in an effort to become less dependent on an advertising system, Weinersmith recently opened a campaign for SMBC on Patreon, a new funding platform launched in May of this year. It allows an artist’s audience to pay for an artist’s work (becoming a “patron,” hence the name) on a subscription basis, anywhere from a few dollars to $100 a month. In a little over a week, SMBC earned a total monthly pledge of $6,700 from 2,300 readers—well above what Weinersmith was expecting, he says.

Patreon’s subscription is set up so that patrons pay every time the creator releases a new piece of content. The creator is able to set tiers of benefits for different subscription amounts, like Weinersmith’s live drawing webcasts, early access to new comics, or monthly Q&A videos, to entice patrons to pay more.

Jack Conte, one of Patreon’s founders, says that content distribution directly through Patreon to facilitate these bonus items is a recent addition. Conte also notes that the platform has already attracted the attention of "a few YouTubers" with over two million subscribers and that January will see a number of high-profile funding launches on the service.

The added perks give Patreon a Kickstarter-like edge over more straightforward subscription methods like PayPal. Creators can also set funding goals for themselves and their audience. For instance, if SMBC reaches $12,000 per month, one of the comic's banner ad slots will be filled with a “curated” banner. At $24,000 per month, Weinersmith would remove ads from the site completely. The amount he has raised has already allowed him to hire a longtime part-time employee into full employment, which means that he now has help to run and organize the site and facilitate its move into hosting events.

The Patreon model harkens back to a theory circulated on the Internet a few years ago that with the Internet's breadth and ease of access, all a creator needed was around 1,000 "true fans"—or people who would pay around $100 a year toward their work—to sustain good business.

Like Kickstarter, though, Patreon pays itself a cut of each creator’s pledges: three percent to cover the cost of processing credit card transactions and five percent toward running the site itself. Weinersmith’s subscriptions as of mid-December are netting Patreon about $530 per month.

Patreon’s model of taking payment from customers only on the release of material goods works in the sense that it ensures that creators follow through. But there’s still a degree of risk on the part of the customer, who is buying what doesn’t yet exist.

Kickstarter has run into similar problems with delivery dates, specs that slip, or products that are never shipped at all. But Kickstarter takes payment when a funding goal has been fulfilled, not upon the completion of work. Still, Patreon’s pay-on-delivery model does require an element of faith from the patrons that what comes will be worth paying for, suggesting it’s a better fit for established personalities or creators.

The other caveat to Patreon’s service is that there's no concept of subscription expiration or renewal. Once a customer is subscribed, they’re on the hook indefinitely until they cancel.

“I just assume I’m completely unemployable,” Weinersmith says. He's been running SMBC for six years and notes that he and most freelancers he knows miss the steady bi-weekly paycheck. “The entire appeal of Patreon to me is the level of stability it seems to promise.”