YouTube Paying Creators Up to Six Figures to Promote Paid Membership and Live Chat Features: Report

YouTube is allegedly paying creators up to six figures upfront to use and promote the platform’s new subscriber engagement features, including but not limited to paid memberships and enhanced “Super Chat” for livestreams, as first reported by Bloomberg on Monday (Aug. 13).

According to the latest figures from YouTube, the number of creators earning five figures on its platform is up by 35 percent year-over-year, while the number earning six figures has grown by 40 percent. But the video platform is facing mounting pressure to keep its top talent on its platform as rivals like Facebook, Instagram and Twitch threaten to steal away market share.

In particular, Instagram, which has over 1 billion monthly active users, launched a new long-form video vertical IGTV in Jun. 2018. Many commentators have framed the launch as a direct stab at YouTube, the same way Instagram Stories has eaten significantly into Snapchat’s traction.

This isn’t the first time YouTube has reportedly pandered creators with money to maximize retention. Back in 2014, the company offered select creators bonuses to sign multiyear deals for hosting content exclusively on their platform. The main impetus at the time was the rise of Vessel, a subscription video service founded in 2015 by former Hulu CEO Jason Kilar, which was offering lucrative deals to poach YouTube stars away to their own platform for up to three days exclusively (Vessel has since folded).

Around the same time as IGTV’s launch earlier this summer, YouTube released several new monetization features for its top creators, focused on merch sales and channel subscriptions. U.S.-based creators with at least 10,000 subscribers now have the option to promote official merch from their Teespring stores in a shelf that shows under their videos; only viewers in the U.S. will be able to see the shelf. There are also significant incentives involved: Teespring is paying creators an extra $1 "YouTube bonus" for every eligible item sold through YouTube-embedded merch shelves, up until Jun. 2019.

The “Super Chat” feature allows fans to pay to pin their comments on certain livestreams. The model is pay-what-you-want, with the duration a comment is pinned depending on how much money that fan is willing to shell out. Interestingly, this sounds quite similar to a fan donation and live micropayment feature called Fan Funding that YouTube launched in 2014, but shut down three years later.

Finally, YouTube’s channel membership program (formerly known as “channel sponsorship”) lets fans pay $4.99 a month in exchange for access to exclusive content on their favorite channels. The feature is available only to channels in the YouTube Partner Program with over 100,000 subscribers, and YouTube takes 30 percent fee off of membership revenue. That’s a friendlier deal for creators than what they would get on Amazon-owned video game livestreaming platform Twitch, which has offered paid channel subscriptions for years (also at $4.99 a month) but charges a whopping 50 percent commission on subscriber revenue on average. On the other hand, other incumbent membership-focused platforms like Patreon charge only a 5 percent commission on pledges.

YouTube hopes that these new options will help pacify concerns from the platform's ever-expanding creator base about their fledgling income, particularly in connection to ad demonetization.

Yet, the exact same week the video platform launched all of these aforementioned monetization capabilities, Facebook announced its own membership program in the form of subscriptions for Groups, allowing any Group admins to charge anywhere from $4.99 to $29.99 per month for access to exclusive content in specified sub-Groups. Indeed, YouTube’s biggest obstacle to nailing paid digital membership and diversified video monetization might be just how crowded the landscape has become.