Discord is introducing a new way for creators to make money by offering community members access to paid, subscriber-only content. The new premium membership offering was among the company’s most requested features and brings a new stream of revenue in-house while giving Discord-based communities the option to streamline the tools they use to grow.
Through premium memberships, Discord communities will be able to place part or all of their content behind a pay gate. Servers could remain mostly free and open with one premium paid channel for the most dedicated members or an entire community could go premium, requiring payment for access.
“Creator success is really the bar by which our team measures our success as well,” Discord Head of Creator Product Marketing Jesse Wofford told TechCrunch.
Discord plans to take a 10 percent cut of paid membership subscriptions, though that number could shift in the future depending on how its experiments in creator monetization go. In May, the company began testing ticketed virtual events, its first feature that allowed creators to make money on the platform.
“As we’ve been chatting with more and more creators we wanted to ensure that they can not only build, but maintain and sustain these amazing communities,” the company said in a blog post. “And we’re already seeing that members of these communities are willing to pay creators for the value that is created.”
Many Discord communities were already using third party services like Patreon to effectively keep some content behind a paywall. With the option brought into Discord itself, anyone who runs a community will be able to create customized tiers of perks which members can subscribe and manage payments within the app, like they already manage a Nitro subscription.
The company is calling premium memberships a “very early pilot” for now and the feature will roll out first to a small group of communities who can test the paid features and offer feedback.
