Alphabet-owned largest video hub, YouTube is empowering its creators to further engage with their community and earn money at the same. It announced a series of new revenue generating tools for creators while celebrating the power of online video content at VidCon Conference in Anaheim, California.
The new cluster of alternative monetization at YouTube includes the rollout of Channel Memberships, Merchandise, Marketing Partnerships between brands and creators via FameBit and the launch of Premieres. All of these introduced tools are aimed to augment the relationship between YouTube creators and their fans.
YouTube Stats
YouTube is a global community of over 1.9 billion users logging-in every month. In addition to that, the platform also serves localized versions across 90 nations and 80 languages. With the help of advertisers, YouTube creators earning five figures and six figures are up by 35 percent and 40 percent, respectively.
Nevertheless, Neal Mohan, Chief Product Officer at YouTube said that the company aims to provide such opportunities to creators where they can make money on their own. And for this, it tested a feature called Super Chat which allows viewers to purchase messages that prominently show up during a Live chat. Witnessing the huge popularity of Super Chat, YouTube is stretching on this feature at a bigger scale.
YouTube is empowering its creators to further engage with their community and earn money at the same.
Channel Memberships
So YouTube already offered a feature called Sponsorships to select group of creators. Soon, it will present the same feature with a new name, Channel Memberships to channels with 100,000 subscribers. In this, viewers pay a monthly subscription fee of $4.99 to receive special badges, customize emoji and exclusive access to Members-only posts in the Community tab. The creators can also share perks with subscribers like exclusive access to live streams, add-on videos and shout-outs.
Here the company will manually cross-check these perks offered by the creators. This will be done only to ensure that the creators put genuine offers that they can deliver and also to check if these perks meet YouTube’s guidelines.
“This tool set is fairly powerful, so we want to make sure that they don’t put products out there that they really can’t commit to” informs Director of Product Management, Rohit Dhawan, heading alternative monetization at YouTube.
Merchandise
Another mode of income generation for YouTube creators is selling products on their channels. The largest video network has teamed up with Teespring so to facilitate creators to choose from over 20 merchandises. The creators can ask Teespring to customize the products and sell them through a shelf on their individual channels. Presently the Merchandise tool is available only in the USA to YouTube creators who have 10,000 subscribers. The company commits to expanding the product portfolio and rolling out the tool to other regions soon.
The largest online video site is also designing its own version of Stories which will be available to select channels with 10,000 subscribers later this year.
YouTube Introduces Channel Memberships, Merchandise, Premieres for Filling Up Creators’ Pockets. Source: YouTube
New Product – Premieres
YouTube is trying to bring some novel improvements to its hugely successful product, Livestream. It is a fresh way of uploading content, Premieres wherein the YouTube creators can upload pre-recorded videos and upload it as Live content. This is something really interesting and new feature. So, how will Premieres work?
When the creators select to broadcast a Premiere, YouTube will by default create a public landing page to generate anticipation and hype about the new content. As a result, when all followers come to the platform to view the Premiere, they can chat with each other and even with the creator in real time via live chat.
Premieres doubles up revenue generation streams for creators. It is so because the online video company has opened up Live video features, Super Chat and Channel Memberships perks on the traditional YouTube uploads.
“We’re going to use our search and discovery platform to promote these,” says Kurt Wilms, Group Product Manager at YouTube leading Live.
As the weekend arrives, it is quite evident that this week belonged to online video content as well as its creators. First, we had Facebook broadening its monetization tools for creators, followed by Instagram launching its own longer video app, IGTV. And now the world’s biggest platform of video content leads the way with latest pro-creator tools.
