A great way to monetize your YouTube channel is by creating a paid membership community for your biggest fans and supporters.
In exchange for usually a small monthly payment, they receive access to different membership perks such as additional content, behind-the-scenes access, and other membership perks.
This article is for you if you want to make money with your YouTube channel, even if you're not yet monetized!
I will show you different platforms and software solutions that you can use to create your membership site.
Memberships Platforms
Here is a list of the most popular membership platforms and software solutions you can use to build your community.
YouTube Channel Memberships
YouTube recently launched its own paid communities feature called "channel memberships".
They allow your viewers to get members-only perks like badges, emojis, bonuses, videos, live chats, and other content by paying a recurring, monthly payment.
Important: the following members-only benefits are not allowed.
- Downloads including music that's available on YouTube
- 1:1 meetings in-person
- Anything that is chosen at random such contests, lotteries, or sweepstakes. If you're offering something, it has to be available for everyone and not just some.
- Anything that's marketed, directed, or targeted at children.
- Anything that's either attractive to, or for children.
YouTube may terminate your channel memberships, if you engage in inappropriate behavior, such as encouraging children to ask their parents to join your channel membership.
Here are some ideas for attractive member-only perks:
- Community posts to show behind the scenes content.
- Members-only live streams and Q&As
- Exclusive videos and early-access to upcoming videos.
- Members-only live chat
- Promo codes for products
- Member-only polls to vote on future video topics
- Secret menu merchandise that's only available to members
To activate channel memberships for your channel, you must have at least 30,000 subscribers (1,000 if you have a gaming channel). Currently, channel memberships are only available in a limited number of countries.
To join, your channel has to be monetized, you have to be 18 years old, and your channel may not have a significant number of ineligible videos such as made for kids or those with music claims.
There are two downsides of YouTube channel memberships that you should be aware of.
- You don't have access to the contact information of your paying channel members. That makes it difficult to migrate to a different platform in the future. You can minimize the impact of this by creating member-only posts on YouTube in which you ask your paying members to join a special email list, just for paying subscribers.
- YouTube will keep a significant amount of your earnings. YouTube creators receive 70%, and YouTube keeps 30%. That's significantly more than most other membership platforms charge.
Patreon
Patreon is one of the oldest and most popular platforms to create communities outside YouTube.
The platform allows you to create different support levels or tiers. Tiers can take one of two forms. Either a monthly recurring payment or a payment per upload (You can choose which uploads you want to monetize.)
Patreon gives you the ability to create trackable benefits. For example, you might want to give a t-shirt to anyone who joins your VIP tier.
In this case, Patreon can automatically collect each person's postal address and create a list of eligible members, so you can easily track who's entitled to a shirt and who's already received theirs.
One of Patreon's strengths is its ability to create gated, member-only content.
If you're looking for inspiration on what kind of member-only content to create, check out this article, where I share over 360+ ideas for membership perks and rewards.
I use my Patreon page to host my private YouTube Mastermind Group.
Subscribe Star
Subscribe Star describes itself as an independent membership platform for musicians, visual artists, and educators.
The design of Subscribe Star pages is among the best. Everything looks clean and slick.
Like Patreon, Subscribe Star allows content creators to create different subscription tiers with membership benefits and rewards.
It offers four content types: text, videos, photos, audio, and file attachments. All files are hosted directly on Subscribe Star.
An example page by documentary filmmaker Cassie Jaye has six reward tiers.
All Subscribe Star payments are subject to a service fee of 5% and transaction processing fees of 2.9% + $0.3 on average.
You can also check out my profile for inspiration.
Mightnetwork
MightNetwork is an all-in-one solution for building an entire website from scratch and monetizing it with online courses, memberships communities, etc. It's available on every platform, on the web, and has a mobile app for iPhone, iPad, and Android.
They offer a free plan with unlimited members, your landing page builder, iOS & Android apps so members of your community chat and direct message with each other and allow you to monetize your community by creating paid membership subscriptions.
And if you upgrade to the Business Plan, you can also sell paid online courses.
There are many features from events, groups, member profiles and badges, activity feed, articles, media, topics, and more.
If you hate learning and working with ten different tools and looking for an all-in-one system for everything, definitely check out MightNetwork.
Disciple
Are you looking for the "Facebook experience" while still owning 100% of your data? Then check out Disciple Media. It's a paid solution and costs $55 per month.
It's essentially your own social media network for your YouTube community. Almost everything is customizable and can be adjusted to your needs.
Disciple has everything you need to keep your fans happy. Each user can create a profile. Members can connect, send messages, or @mention to other members in posts. You have a Facebook-style newsfeed with #hastags and groups.
Best of all, you have a ton of built-in monetization features for paid subscriptions and sponsorships. You can also embed your own Shopify store to sell and promote products to your community members.
If you want to have your app – built for you and distributed both in the iOS and Android App store – you can upgrade to Disciple's Mobile App plan for $389 per month.
This will be an exciting option for larger influencers, as the native mobile phone apps come with built-in in-app purchases that make paid subscriptions for your biggest fans even easier.
A great example is the Makers Playground YouTube channel community app on the iOS App Store, where viewers of the channel share photos, videos, and plans of self-made creations.
Paid facebook groups
One of the most popular DIY methods to create a paid membership group has been to create a private, invite-only Facebook group, and then only to invite people who paid for their membership outside of Facebook.
Often group owners would create two groups, a public, free group to recruit members for their paid group and a private, paid group.
Group owners would frequently promote the benefits of their paid groups to their free members and then either share or DM an external payment link to members who want to join.
The problem with DIY paid Facebook groups is the inability to automate your processes. You always have to monitor new orders in your external payment processor, manually identify their Facebook profile and invite them into your private paid group.
If members stopped their payment or their card declined, you would have to go back to your group, find their profile, and manually remove them.
By far, the biggest downside of Facebook groups, in general, is the lack of control when it comes to content distribution.
Since you don't own or have access to any of your members' contact information, you can't email them if you have an important announcement.
This forces you to trust and rely on Facebook's newsfeed and notification algorithm, which is unreliable. If users don't consistently open your group daily and interact with the group content in commenting and liking, Facebook will show them fewer updates from your group.
Workplace by facebook
The grown-up cousin of Facebook groups is called Workplace by Facebook. Originally designed as an in-house social media network for companies and an alternative to Slack, this solution is a true powerhouse.
The difference between Workplace by Facebook and Facebook groups is that you don't need a Facebook account to join a Workplace. An email address is all it takes.
Facebook offers a free Essentials plan with some limited functionality but no limit in terms of how many users can join.
To monetize your Workplace, you have to collect member payments outside of Facebook with your e-commerce solution.
After payment, you can add people to your Workplace account by inviting them via their email addresses.
Even better is that Workplace allows you to export all members as an Excel spreadsheet. This makes it super convenient to switch platforms if you so desire in the future.
In terms of content, you can post any content type that you can share on Facebook and a few more.
A big plus in terms of features that you won't find in Facebook groups is the ability for live chat and video conferences with up to 20 people per call.
You also can create up to 50 groups within the free plan.
If you want to have a robust DIY membership site that's jam-packed with features, Workplace by Facebook is a great solution.
Facebook subscription groups
In 2018 Facebook tested a new feature with selected Facebook group owners. It was called Facebook Subscription Groups and group owners a native way to monetize their Facebook groups by charging a monthly membership fee for group members.
Membership payments were collected via the iOS and Android Facebook apps, resulting in a 30% cut of a member's first-year subscription fee and 15% after that.
The problem with paid Facebook groups is the same as regular Facebook groups. Group owners don't have access to the contact information of their members, except for their Facebook profiles.
This makes it very challenging to switch platforms because you can't just download everyone's contact information and move them to a different platform.
Today, this feature seems to have been abandoned by Facebook. There have been no new announcements about Facebook Subscription Groups by Facebook since 2018.
Facebook fan subscription
To join the Facebook Fan Subscription program, you must meet three criteria. Qualify for in-stream ads, get a brand collabs manager, and be personally invited by Facebook.
In-Stream Ads Requirement
- 10,000 page-followers or more
- within the last 60 days, your page has to have at least
- 30,000 x 1-minute views on videos that are at least 3 minutes long.
Brand Collabs Manager
- 1,000 page-followers or more
- within the last 60 days, your page has to have at least
- 15,000 post engagements such as likes, comments, or shares.
- 30,000 x 1-minute views on videos that are at least 3 minutes long.
- 180,000 minutes viewed between all of your videos.
Based on the numbers, it's safe to assume that Facebook is eyeing for larger, more established YouTubers to use their platform.
To translate the combined requirement into YouTube terms, your channel would need at least 10,000 subscribers and 18,000 watch hours per year.
Unless you already have a highly engaged video channel on your Facebook page, I wouldn't recommend getting started.
You can check if your Facebook page is eligible for fan subscriptions.
Tribe
Tribe is in many ways similar to Workplace by Facebook. The design looks very clean and organized. And you can also create groups within your tribe.
Tribe offers a free plan with up to 500 members. You choose between a public tribe where anyone can create a new account or an invite-only account.
To turn your tribe into a paid community, you have to collect payments outside of Tribe. In the free plan, you have to invite new members after payment manually. Or you can upgrade to the Pro plan, which offers Zapier integration, and put this task on autopilot.
Within Tribe, you can share member-only content with your community by using the six different content types: text, photos, videos, files, questions/polls, and discussions.
Tribe helps new tribes grow their community faster by selectively enabling or disabling certain features based on their current stages Inception, Establishment, maturity, and Mitosis.
"In each stage, a community has different needs and considerations. For example, in the very first days of building a community (inception phase) there are not considerable number of activities going on. Therefore, we remove the timestamps and use “Posted Recently”, we hide question and discussion stats from users, and many other little changes. This will hide the fact that the community does not have significant interactions from unregistered or new members. As the community grows, you will move to new stages where the needs are different. In short, selecting the right stage for your community will enable/disable certain features based on the best practices for that particular stage."
Tribe
Discourse
Discourse comes in two versions, a hosted version with built-in support, starting from $100 per month, and a free, self-hosted version that you can install on your server.
Discourse focuses on three main features:
- discussion forum
- long-form chat room
- mailing list
To turn your Discourse forum into a paid community, you have to turn your community into an invite-only forum or create private forum boards for paying community members.
Collect payments with your payment gateway and manually add and remove members once per month.
Invision Community
Invision is an interesting software with more features any creator could ever wish for. They offer two versions of their community software a hosted solution based on a max number of simultaneous users and a self-hosted version.
In terms of monetization features, Invision offers you to sell premium community memberships. You can raise donations towards different community goals, have a built-in online store that allows you to sell almost anything.
A very cool and unique way to make money on Invision is called Paid Club Memberships. It allows your community members to create their own paid clubs within your site. As the community owner, you can take a commission on all payments.
Invision also offers its marketplace with free and paid add-ons to extend the features of your community site.
Conclusion
There are many options for monetizing your YouTube channel with paid membership sites.
I recommend starting with Patreon because of the huge amount of features and their risk-free business model of only charging a commission of 5%, 8%, or 12% when you get paid, depending on your Patreon tier and feature level.
Alternatively, you might give SubscribeStar a try as a solid alternative to Patreon.
In addition, you can turn on paid YouTube channel memberships once you're eligible, but don't build your real community with it. Always choose a platform where you own 100% of the data.
As you grow, I recommend considering moving your community to a paid provider such as MightNetwork or Disciple, especially if you want to start selling additional digital and physical products such as online courses and merch to your community.
To learn more, check out my article on how to monetize your YouTube audience and how to design your membership tiers and rewards to make the most amount of money with your paid community.
