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Now there's one fewer way to support your favorite indie artists
Whether you're crafting YouTube videos, blogging for yourself or making another form of content for the web, earning a living off of your creative output can be tough. That's where services like Patreon and Subbable come in. Both are fairly similar subscription tools (fans agree to give a certain amount whenever an artist releases a new piece of content), so it makes sense that the former would acquire the smaller latter. The move brings Subbable creators Hank Green and John Green, along with two dozen others, to Patreon according to TechCrunch. The reasoning is fairly straightforward: Subbable's payment platform, Amazon Flexible Payments System, is shutting down come June. The brothers Green feared that their service would lose a ton of subscribers in the process of overhauling the cash-handling platform, and Patreon's Jack Conte saw that as an opportunity to merge the two companies.
Watch this rundown on the 'Pre-history of Online Video'
Hokay, so here we go: before the likes of Leroy Jenkins, that kid David who went to the dentist and Keyboard Cat blew up on YouTube, there wasn't exactly a centralized place to check out the latest videos your friends were talking about. Instead, those of types clips went viral via email and at places like eBaum's World, or, in the case of StrongBad Emails, on a sort of network all their own. In the clip below Hank Green, host of Crash Course and brother to The Fault in Our Stars author John Green, gives a quick rundown of what online video was like prior to YouTube. We highly suggest watching it; it's worth your time, we promise. And if you've been online for as long as we have, it's likely to bring back a few fond internet memories. Should the video not satiate your thirst for nostalgia, however, perhaps a Homestar Runner chaser (...or three, or four) will do the trick.
