YouTube content creators with 50K + subscribers can now get membership

YouTube content creators; get your membership now!

Several months ago YouTube rolled out a new membership feature for content creators in beta, which would allow users to subscribe to channels and have access to extra perks like unique badges, new emoji and Member-only posts- for $4.99/month.

There’s a slight problem though; to qualify for membership you need to have over 100 000 subscribers; chilled!

Realising their mistake, YouTube has now lowered the Membership bar to content creators with 50 000 + subscribers.

That’s not where their problems end; they have the same membership business model to their competitors like Twitch, which is also $4.99/month and has the same perks available.

YouTube, eager to gain creators, launched two other costly and limiting features- Premieres and Merchandise.

Premiere and Merchandise

With Merchandise, content creators with over 10K subscribers can sell their own-you guessed it-merchandise.

However, they can only sell merchandise created on Teespring (a partner of YouTube…)

As is reported in Digital Music News, “Premieres merely mimics features available on other, more successful platforms, at least in terms of monetization – Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitch.”

And as Engadget notes (who broke the story), YouTube’s evolution of monetization is only harming smaller content creators.

Last year a German professor found that 96.5% of YouTube’s content creators don’t earn enough- but that’s nothing we haven’t heard before.

So even as YouTube content creators get access to membership schemes with perks, it still won’t put actual food on creators’ tables.