Premium Memberships on Discord allows creators to monetize servers
In order to commercialise their servers, Discord is testing a new Premium Membership offering. This week, Discord’s 150 million monthly active users will be able to pay to visit a variety of channels or servers and support authors.
Premium Memberships allow authors to provide more content or access to community members. Communities may now build tiers of incentives, track member involvement, and lock channels or entire servers to paying members.
While Discord already offers interfaces with Patreon, YouTube, Twitch, and other sites, Premium Memberships will be totally native to Discord. To keep up with this trend, Discord has chosen a 90/10 split with authors, allowing Discord communities to keep 90% of all money.
“We want to make sure creators make as much money as possible while also making sure Discord makes money if creators succeed,” says Vaidya. “We wanted to make sure both parties were invested in the long run.”
It’s unclear how this income split will work for mobile subscribers. Subscriptions and in-app purchases like this are currently only available through Discord’s desktop and browser clients.
“Creators love this feature,” says Vaidya. “While many creators already do this through third parties, this will be the first time they can do it directly on Discord.”
