Should You Start a YouTube Channel Membership?

[00:01] in 2018 changing the landscape of monetization on the platform forever suddenly creators could get recurring support from their biggest fans and give them special perks in return right on their Channel if you're looking for the

[00:14] your biggest fans and monetize your premium content you might be wondering are YouTube channel memberships the golden ticket to actually making money as a Creator or are there better ways to monetize your premium content the answer

[00:28] depends on what you want to put in and get out of your monetization efforts first let's dig into what you can do with a YouTube channel membership if you you'll be able to turn on channel memberships and create membership tiers

[00:43] for your audience to choose from the YouTube channel Rose and Rosie has almost 1 million subscribers and they use the YouTube channel membership pretty effectively when subscribers click the join button on their Channel a

[00:55] pop-up appears with the tiers that they can join from 99 cents a month for the can join from 99 cents a month for the time tiny tatties to 14.99 for the Frog Royale members each new tier unlocks new perks like loyalty badges custom emojis

[01:09] and membership only videos every month right there on the YouTube channel their main YouTube channel their Vlog Channel gaming channel and Spotify original podcast these two already have a wide variety of income streams and a

[01:23] YouTube membership makes perfect sense for them they don't need to depend on that channel membership as their primary revenue stream so it's a simple way to sell and distribute premium content on a platform where their viewers already

[01:36] to that where your premium content is just one of many many income streams or you want to monetize without building a fully fledged business then a channel membership might be right for you but if you're looking to build a true business

[01:50] are some major drawbacks to a channel membership that you need to know about starting up a food truck you want it to look a certain way you have a menu all planned out and then someone shows up with a list of rules about a mile long

[02:05] they tell you that your food truck can only have one design with no customization and they say you can only offer a certain number of menu items and and after that they tell you there's only one spot in the entire city that

[02:19] thousand other identical food trucks are already right next door that's the experience of trying to build a business on YouTube you don't have much if any control a channel membership on YouTube looks like YouTube sure you can change

[02:33] the name and offer different perks but at the end of the day it's YouTube's branding and not yours that gets the Lion's Share of the screen and every other channel looks the same as for the list of banned ingredients well that's

[02:46] YouTube's restriction on the type of perks you can offer if you want to do contests for only your highest tier of membership or offer downloads of content that's on YouTube tough luck if that's not bad enough the hypothetical food

[02:58] truck police also come around around every month demanding their share of the earnings if you've been successful it's going to cost you even more and here's why if you charge five dollars for your membership YouTube takes a dollar fifty

[03:10] per member that's because as of filming YouTube takes 30 of your earnings with no limit no 30 doesn't sound too bad at the start but that's almost a third of means that as you scale the cost of doing business on the platform will just

[03:24] go up and up and up to seriously scale your business flat rates paying a set price per month and per subscriber fees are a better way to go they're for creating and selling high value content the way that YouTube does that

[03:39] way as you grow the percent of your income that goes to platform fees will actually go down instead of staying at that 30 percent plus I've got to point out that YouTube has a habit of changing its pricing structure there's just no

[03:52] guarantee that you'll be able to charge what you want or that they won't change sound like I'm trashing Channel memberships pretty harshly but here's the thing they can still be an incredibly useful tool for your business

[04:06] if you go in with the right expectations or if you're using it as a stepping stone to greater things but if you're already looking for greater things then membership what I'm talking about here is an independent video membership

[04:19] platform with your own website and your own branding not somebody else's the membership and a YouTube channel membership is that you'll have total control like control over what your website looks like what's included in

[04:32] your Content Library what perks you offer and even what your prices are plus you can even create your own branded apps to create a distraction-free environment specifically for your community independent video memberships

[04:44] are built specifically for Creative entrepreneurs who want to turn their content membership into a scalable profitable business without the own membership is actually pretty easy check out the video on screen for our

[04:57] complete guide on how to launch one thanks so much for watching I'll see you thanks so much for watching I'll see you next time