financing Crowd funding

My wife and I are watching a religious series that is crowd funded. The Chosen. Season 4 is in production. They claim to have a 1.2 million dollar budget/episode. If this series really is crowd funded, it just indicates that there is a massive, hungry audience out there willing to pay to have something produced that they really want to watch. What more could a producer hope for?
 
Fantastic series! Part of how their budget is increasing each season I think has do with their distribution model. It's free to watch, but they encourage you to pay it forward by donating a few bucks. When you watch an episode, there's a quick blurb at the start about who made it possible for you to watch for free. It's really clever I think. I wish there was a way to do something like this on a YouTube video that is already uploaded. Add a call to action at the end of something like, "If you enjoyed this movie, please consider supporting the next one by donating here: www.yourwebsite.com"
My last flick has 1.5 million views on YouTube and I'm shooting the third part this summer. I can't help but wonder if I had a call to action like that at the end if I could of raised some money that way.
 
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I've got a link in the description, but nobody seems to read that given that I still have to answer questions on a weekly basis that are in the description. I could re-upload the film with the CTA at the end, but then I'd lose all the views and SEO and algorithm stuff that's been built up over ten years.

The only thing I've really considered is doing a "remastered" version where I fix some color correction and bad VFX, then upload that with a CTA at the end just as the credits roll. Maybe at the beginning too.
 
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Fantastic series! Part of how their budget is increasing each season I think has do with their distribution model. It's free to watch, but they encourage you to pay it forward by donating a few bucks. When you watch an episode, there's a quick blurb at the start about who made it possible for you to watch for free. It's really clever I think. I wish there was a way to do something like this on a YouTube video that is already uploaded. Add a call to action at the end of something like, "If you enjoyed this movie, please consider supporting the next one by donating here: www.yourwebsite.com"
My last flick has 1.5 million views on YouTube and I'm shooting the third part this summer. I can't help but wonder if I had a call to action like that at the end if I could of raised some money that way.
Everyone is already doing that. The site is called Patreon, and is specifically built for direct income from youtube. It's so widely used not that probably 20% of youtube income is via patreon. It's set up for subscription, so people can start watching your show and just donate 10 bucks a month or whatever on autopilot. Some people have made millions from patreon, especially channels that got demonitized by youtube for various reasons, like mentioning violence in a video that's directly next to a copy of Die Hard that youtube offers free with ads that pay them. I've already set up a patreon account, and pending the rebuild of the website and a few other steps will launch it this year. You can use some functions of the youtube studio dashboard to attach messages and video links to your videos that are already uploaded, and it's common to simply link to your patreon page in the description of each video.
 
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