YouTube launches new Membership Tiers offering viewers channel-exclusive perks at five different price points
A brand new tiered Membership feature has been launched by YouTube that will offer yet another way for fans and viewers to support content creators.
This new feature allows YouTubers to offer five different Membership tiers to viewers at five different price points, each of which will offer fans exclusive content and access.
The five price points are currently set at monthly rates of $1.99, $4.99, $9.99, $14.99, and $24.99, and it appears that the name of each tier can be chosen by the YouTuber.
As for the perks, there is a variety of content that viewers can receive for becoming a member, such as loyalty badges in comments and live chat, custom emojis, ranks in the YouTuber’s Discord, and more.
An image of what this all looks like was provided by Ryan ‘Fwiz’ Wyatt, Head of Gaming at YouTube, who posted a snapshot of the new feature on KreekCraft’s channel.
We’ve launched Membership tiers in Beta and you can see it on @KreekCraft‘s channel already. Creators can offer up to 5 price levels (depending on what they want to offer for each tier). You can also create targeted Community posts for each level of members. pic.twitter.com/nza9HwINIJ
— Ryan Wyatt (@Fwiz) January 25, 2019
Currently in beta, this feature is an extension of the already existing Memberships service on YouTube, which gave fans the chance to support and sponsor a channel for the base price of $4.99.
However, this is clearly a huge step of expansion, creating a system that can now legitimately be considered a rival to Twitch’s current subscription service, which follows a similar model but only offers three tiers.
As with the original Memberships program, creators will need to have 100,000 subscribers or more, be 18 years old order, and be members of the YouTube Partner Program to be eligible for this feature.
YouTube first launched their Memberships service in 2018, but this new extension is a huge step forward.
Shortly following its launch, YouTubers have already offered up ideas for how this new feature can be further improved. One popular suggestion has been enabling a channel’s custom emotes to be used in the comments and chat sections of other channels, much like how emotes work on Twitch.
Another idea that seems to already be in the works is having Community posts targeted for each Membership tier, which could be used for tier-exclusive promotions.
