Discord Ramps Up Creator Monetization With Monthly Memberships

Discord is introducing its most robust creator monetization avenue to date: Premium Memberships.

The chat platform, which counts more than 150 million monthly active users and serves as a hub for many content creators and their communities, began dabbling in monetization earlier this year with the introduction of pay-gated audio gatherings called Stage Channels.

Now, it’s bringing in monthly Premium Memberships to give creators and community owners a way to pay-gate parts or all of their servers.

“This is one of the most requested features from creators and we’re already seeing many of our communities offering this type of experience through third parties,” Discord said in a blog post about the new feature. (To be clear, Premium Memberships are separate from Nitro, the $9.99-a-month premium version of Discord that unlocks things like animated emojis and the ability to boost servers. Premium Memberships are subscriptions to individual servers; Nitro is a subscription to Discord itself.)

During a press demo, Discord’s lead product manager for creator products, Derek Yang, said Discord developed Premium Memberships in an effort to “make it more sustainable to run Discord communities.”

“Our mission is to reward and empower creators to sustainably create,” he said.

Jesse Wofford, Discord’s group product marketing manager, added that Discord thinks of creators simply as people who build communities. “This includes more traditional content creators, but it also more broadly encapsulates a somewhat nascent class of creator, where the community itself is the type of content they’re facilitating,” he said.

Creators who enable memberships on their servers can customize up to three membership tiers with prices anywhere between $2.99 and $99.99 per month. They’ll be able to choose what level of server access and other perks will be granted on each tier, and will get analytics about member engagement, Discord says.

At the press demo, Wofford said creators will receive 90% of membership fees, and Discord will take 10%.

Discord has not yet determined a payout schedule, but is working with creators to “figure out what’s best,” Wofford said.

He added that for now, Discord aims to alpha test Premium Memberships with around 20 creators and server owners to “see if this is really working and delivering.”

Yang said the introduction of Premium Memberships will not affect Discord’s established partnerships and integrations with platforms like YouTube, Twitch, and Patreon, which let users who subscribe to creators on those sites automatically access content and/or perks on Discord.

“These integrations are not going anywhere,” he said. “[Premium Memberships is] a complement and supplement.”