Madeline Purdue

USA TODAY

Hungry amateur artists are finding new ways to turn a dime on the Internet — beyond YouTube.

While Google's video-sharing site has become synonymous with discovering the next hot musician, content creators have turned to other platforms designed specifically to help them share their work, connect with their fan base and make money.

Creators on these platforms can make anywhere from $7,000 per video/comic/photo to over $40,000 per month. These websites, which include Patreon, Live.Me, Bandcamp, Pivotshare and YouNow, typically take a cut of money raised in exchange for the platform.

Related:

How to make money on YouTube

What might suit one artist might not be the best option for you. Some are oriented to musicians; others cast a wider net, hosting writers and visual artists. The percentage they take from the artists' money raised varies, too.

Here's an overview:

Patreon gives creators, from comic book writers to musicians to comedians, a place to display their creative content while connecting with their fans personally. Co-founders Jack Conte and Sam Yam created Patreon to help Internet artists make money after their experience making videos on YouTube led to low income.

“There was such a discrepancy between what I felt like I was giving back to the world and what I was getting paid for,” Conte told USA Today.

How It Works:

You make a Patreon page to share content on and advertise on your other platforms (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) that you are a part of Patreon, encouraging your fans to check it out. Fans then go to the your page and become your “patron” by paying you to create more content.

You can set up different pay-tiers so the fans that pay you more have bigger and better rewards.

For example, Patreon member Peter Hollens creates music videos. According to his Patreon page, he has more than 3,000 patrons and makes more than $13,000 per video post. Hollens has nine different payment tiers his patrons can choose from in order to see his content. These range from “Patreon Hollens Family”, where members can pay him $1 per music video and in return get 25% off his merchandise, to “Angel Investor”, which costs patrons $750 per music video. Hollens’ Patreon page says he will fly these patrons out to one of his video shoots to be behind the scenes.

Patreon will be paying its creators more than $150 million in 2017, with the top creators making up to $70,000 a month, Conte told USA TODAY. A Patreon page is free, but the company takes 5% of creators’ profit.

Conte recommends creators create a following on other platforms before creating a Patreon page, so that when they launch, they can start getting paid right away by their fans.

Artist’s Perspective:

Kinda Funny has been creating videos, podcasts and cartoons on Patreon for more than two years. They were one of the original creators on Patreon, and now have two pages that bring in around $40,000 a month from their 12,000 patrons.

The outfit is composed of five friends that left their jobs at IGN.com to pursue doing what they love: creating content for their fans on YouTube. They found out about Patreon at VidCon in 2014 and launched their two pages, Kinda Funny and Kinda Funny Games, within a few months. They started making $10,000 a month almost instantly.

They spent a year and a half creating their content in a spare bedroom before their fans helped them raise enough money to buy a studio. They are now hiring people to work for them and building a team around their content.

“Everything we’ve done is because of the support we get on Patreon, and this fan base we have that understands that they’re contributing to our dream,” said Kinda Funny member Greg Miller. “Without any hyperbole, Patreon changed our lives.”

Miller said Patreon takes the 5% cut and charges processing fees from PayPal. The rest goes back to Kinda Funny.

“You have to be 100% in on this,” Miller said to USA Today. “This is about your hardest of hardcore fans coming out and giving you money and support and saying they believe you and that you’re worth it. So, if you’re not going to take it seriously, (fans) are not going to take it seriously.”

Bandcamp is a platform built specifically for musicians to share their music with their fans. The website also contains a section for audiobooks and podcasts.

“We treat music as art, not content, and we tie the success of our business to the success of the artists who we serve,” says the Bandcamp website.

How It Works:

You can sign up as an artist, fan or even a label on Bandcamp.

As an artist, you can set up their own page to sell their music and merchandise. You determine how much you want your fans to pay for individual songs or whole albums. You also can require a minimum payment instead of a set price so fans can choose to pay more if they want.

Bandcamp also provides tools to you so you can track what music is reaching your audience and help you manage your sales. The website also releases the number of songs and albums sold per artist to music charts so you can receive recognition if your music is being rapidly sold.

The artist and fan pages are free. Bandcamp takes 15% of the profit from digital sales and 10% from merchandise.

Labels can also sign up on Bandcamp to discover and manage artists. A label accounts costs $20 per month for 15 artists or $50 per month for unlimited artists. These accounts also have tools to track statistics on sales and fan-bases as well as pay artists.

“Our revenue share-based business model means we only make money when artists make a lot more money,,” Bandcamp told USA Today.

According to Bandcamp, fans have paid artists $5.3 million in the last month and $221 million total. Its artists sell approximately 29,000 records a day and obtain over 100,000 new users each month.

Artist’s Perspective:

Dub Fx has been on Bandcamp for eight years. He is a street musician from Melbourne that has played venues in 40 countries. His Dub FX YouTube channel has more than 16 million views. He says he's sold more than 200,000 records and has played at festivals such as Coachella.

“Bandcamp helped us nurture and grow our audience. We could capture emails and allow fans to have control over price,” said Dub Fx representative CAde Anderson. “The experience felt like it embraced a real direct connection between artist and audience. Music is all about that for us.”

According to Anderson, Bandcamp takes out the “middle man” and helps artists that don’t want to pay a label to promote their work. Artists have more flexibility with their work while also giving fans more control over pricing.

“As a music consumer, I love finding hidden gems in Bandcamp. It may not have the giant user base as some of the other music download and streaming services, however the online ‘digging through the crates’ energy of it makes it truly special,” said Anderson.

Pivotshare is a website that creates subscription channels for people who make videos. These fall under multiple categories, including fitness, religion, professional and more.

“Pivotshare’s primary goal is not to just help you sell your video content, but to help you sell more of it…we continue to build new, innovative technologies that help publishers measure their success and market their content more effectively,” reads their website.

How It Works:

Pivotshare has different categories of videos, and under those categories are channels that members create. For example, under the Fitness category, there would be separate channels for yoga, CrossFit and more.

Pivotshare encourages you to collaborate with other members so that you aren’t solely responsible for creating content on a channel. You and others can contribute videos to one channel and everyone gets paid. However, the owner of the channel earns more than the contributors.

People who visit Pivotshare can sign up for a monthly subscription to your channel so they can have access to all your videos. You can also provide a pay-per-video option.

Pivotshare offers a number of marketing tools to users to track profits and ratings. The website is also built so that it makes sharing content to social media and other platforms easier.

It is free to make a Pivotshare page and collaborate with other members, but the company takes 30% of your profit — higher than the others.

Artist’s Perspective:

Tracy Campoli creates fitness videos and shares them on Pivotshare. She has been a member for a year and a half.

While Campoli built her following on YouTube, where she has 100,000 subscribers, her earnings nearly quadrupled after a short time on Pivotshare. She said her fans were happy to follow her to the platform.

“The truth is that [Pivotshare] was really profitable for me,” said Campoli.

She was attracted to Pivotshare because it was a platform she could easily use to put content up and increase what she was already doing. She was using her channel less than two weeks after she signed up.

“I really wanted to be able to grow and give people the full experience,” said Campoli.

Campoli thought the 30% Pivotshare took from her profit was justified because it did a lot of the back-end work of the website and staff were always there for support. There were downsides: having little say in the website, when new updates wouldn't work as planned, and complaints from subscribers about streaming quality.

Pivotshare didn’t help grow her following, and she mostly gained subscribers after they watched her short workouts on YouTube, who then went to her Pivotshare channel.

But it helped her get to the next step of her career. Campoli has now created her own website for her workouts, Total Body Transformation.

“I felt really grateful to get started there, I had a great experience with them,” said Campoli.

With the right platform, you too can make money doing what you love. You might even be able to quit your day job.

Follow USA TODAY's Madeline Purdue on Twitter, @madelinepurdue.