YouTube Offers Incentives to Platform Creators with the Launch of Their New Revenue Generation Tools

Nivedya Varma

August 15, 2018

The Google-owned Company Is Offering Cash to Platforms to Try out Their New Tools while the Competition of Digital Video Gets More Intense.

The competition continues to rise while leveraging video platforms for profit and YouTube has doled out their new revenue generation tools for the same.

YouTube is now offering to pay top platform stars to showcase their new features, which include the enhanced “Super Chat” tool and other paid membership packages.

Bloomberg reported that YouTube is apparently offering “tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars” to popular stars to try their new features and tools. The figures have not been specified since the right amount was not made public.

YouTube’s Reason behind Launching Their New Tools

A lot of the new tools offered by YouTube include their June revelations such as the platform’s merchandise rack for product tie-ups, Channel Memberships, and paid subscription/chats.

YouTube rolled in these tools to keep up with major competitors and to appease popular talent. A lot of people this year with large followings on YouTube were dissatisfied with YouTube’s take on not offering ways to make money beyond advertising

According to Bloomberg, “Many people with large followings on the video site have complained that [YouTube] doesn’t offer ways to make money beyond advertising and that YouTube’s efforts to shield advertisers from controversial content has hurt their sales.”

Competitors of YouTube immediately seized the opportunity and approached YouTube platform creators while promoting their new features and tools. Facebook’s Instagram and Amazon’s Twitch offered tools which reduced the dependency on advertising by selling subscriptions to fans that want the ability to use certain symbols in chats and an early access to programming.

YouTube’s Idea behind Merchandise Sales

YouTube has made it easier for creators to sell merchandise by expanding the number of users that can sell monthly subscriptions. The Super Chat features let fans of a YouTube star pay to highlight their messages in live chat streams. These features are an aid to higher profit margins for both YouTube and its parent company Alphabet Inc. thus letting the firm create more ways of generating money despite mere advertising.

Neal Mohan, YouTube’s Chief Product Officer said, “It’s something creators have been asking for, and we’ve built the products hand-in-hand with them.”

Whereas the company said, “We have no new initiative in place. We have always invested in our creators’ success and will continue to do so to ensure they have a great experience and can find continued growth and opportunity on YouTube.”

In the past, YouTube has also offered payments directly when it felt pressured by new competition. The new YouTube contracts do not require people to only post on YouTube but it does have rules of prohibition if the people post first on competitor’s sites.

YouTube though has an active base of 1.8 billion users and are not giving into the heated competition. The launch of these new tools will help platform creators understand the benefits of YouTube’s new revenue generating streams and convince others to try the same, thus helping the platform stay active and progress further.

Nivedya Varma

Nivedya is a creative writer with a background in mass communication and advertising. Coupled with that is her ardent passion for moulding words to suit varied niches such as marketing, tech, SEO content, artificial intelligence, B2B advertising, and culture. In times of leisure, you'll find her zoning into space with cats, old-school music and herself for company.