There are two important things to understand when it comes to monetizing content production effectively. One, when you have a strong, unique brand that produces content that people love and identify with people want to give you money. Two, the concept of consumer surplus, market segmentation, etc. (see here: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...).

At the simplest level if you offer a quality product and you let people pay whatever they want for it, even nothing, you will still make money. That alone may not be enough to cover your costs, but it's an important realization. The difference between the "you need to control your customers, sell them to advertisers, and force ads down their throats" mindset versus the "you need to engage with your users and they will support you no matter what" mindset is like night and day, being so diametrically opposite can make it difficult to make the transition.

The easy level of monetization is to let people give you money in exchange for "nothing". Offer donations, or patronage support with token rewards (such as being thanked, put in the credits, etc.), and merch that allows people to show off their support or that allows people to express their identity through a connection to you or your content (this works for everything not just rock bands or web comics).

Up from there you can offer more substantive rewards. You can offer subscriptions that gain people access to extra content, to content earlier than it will be publicly available, to higher levels of credit, or to higher levels of engagement and connection with creators.

You can package your content in different forms and release it as a compilation, charging money for it or offering it to subscribers. Say you're a web comic, you can print books containing your comics by year or by story line or whatever. If you're a musical artist you might release all of the tracks you're working on at any given time freely (through youtube or mp3 downloads) but then cut an album of the tracks (perhaps after re-recording them and having them professionally mixed/mastered) and sell that (either digitally, in physical form, or likely both). If you write you can compile stuff into books focusing on certain themes. And so on.

You can break your work up into specific projects and crowd fund each project. This also gives you the advantage that you'll typically end up having to figure out how to produce various products out of that project to use as rewards, which you can also sell afterwards.

And that's just a start, there are tons of other options.

These things aren't viable for "content" creators who don't produce a lot of original content or that don't produce content of high enough quality to engage strongly with their fans, and I'm mostly ok with that. There are tons of clickbait and tabloid content creators out there who survive not because they produce anything of value but because today eyes can be monetized through ads. The main problem here is that income inequality is at such an extreme level that a lot of people have hardly any disposable income to support anything, no matter how much they value it, but the effects of that are even more wide ranging.