Walter,

As others have posted it's really tough to make a living on the internet if you aren't going big. Free content is simply too plentiful and often it's of amazing quality. On another board there was a discussion about the F3T and how unhappy several posters were with this years' line-up. Overall the assessment was the films were of poor production quality, generally uninteresting, and overall not worth the price of admission. I haven't been recently, but I felt much the same way when I went. More than half of everything shown was an extended trailer for a lengthier film and only a few selections were "feature length". I have a hard time justifying attending when most of the content I could have seen online for free. Given Orvis now has a "Fly Fishing Theater" site, it's pretty easy to get good, high quality content and the cost is zero.

All this is to say if you are going to monetize your internet content you have to be exceptional and provide real value. Patreon and similar sites are great, but to make anything off it you'll need to put out a lot of content day to day as you are only paid when your content goes live. Once live if it's watched 10 Million times and you only have 1000 Patron's you'll only get the Patron donation 1000 times, so that means lots of content. Several artists (musical) I follow have begun using Patreon and they are putting out content 1-2 times per week in some cases just so they can make a living off it. In other cases the web presence leads to actual paying work and I believe in some cases that was the intention all along. YouTube and similar sites provide the exposure which leads to paying work. This being said, everyone I know who works in the fly fishing industry says that nobody is going to get rich doing so and perhaps that needs to be modified to "nobody will make a living". Most of the guys I know who guide during the summer have full-time paying gigs during the non-summer months (in many cases teaching so they have the summers off). It may be that if you want to live near Yellowstone your only option is to find a paying gig which doesn't involve fly fishing.

I wish you the best.

Brian