Discord dives deeper into the creator economy with paid memberships

Discord announced on Tuesday it’s testing a premium membership feature that will allow creators to charge fans in their discussion groups.

The news: Discord said it’ll allow creators to charge $3 to $100 per month for premium subscription access to groups, aka servers. Discord will take a 10% cut of paid membership subscriptions. Creators can gate part or all of their group behind a paid subscription and look at analytics data.

What’s next: For now, Discord is only allowing 11 creators to charge fans to access their Discord communities. The San Francisco-based company says it’ll be expanding the premium feature to more communities in 2022.

Why? Creators have long offered access to exclusive Discord servers via Patreon, YouTube, Twitch, and OnlyFans. That route, however, prevented it from taking a cut. With premium memberships, Discord hopes to win back lost revenue.

Why it matters: Discord’s premium memberships put it into direct competition with Patreon, OnlyFans, Twitch, and YouTube. And more competition to serve creators is a net positive for the creator economy.

An evolution: Though Discord’s roots are in gaming, the company now has 150+ million users engaging with crypto, meditation, entrepreneurship, hobbies, and, of course, pornography. The company recently raised $500 million at a $15 billion valuation, which should help it bleed off revenue from Patreon and other creator-focused platforms.

App discovery: Discord recently announced that it’s launching an app discovery platform that will allow users to peruse a directory of apps and add bots to their server groups. The discovery platform will start in the Spring of 2022 with about 12,000 verified apps. More than 30 percent of Discord servers use bots, and 430,000 of them are used each week, Discord said.

Events: Discord also launched a few features to enhance communities’ events. In October it launched Stage Channels to help event hosts manage larger-scale audio events. Nearly a million communities have run a Stage Channel event, hosting AMAs, open mics, and even beatboxing competitions.

Servers of stolen content: Discord has been a repository of stolen content — especially sexually explicit content — from other paid platforms. SEO Bounty founder Richard Lewis offers a thorough breakdown here of how many Discord users share “OnlyFans leaks” on the platform.

“Right now hundreds of thousands of stolen pictures and videos owned by OnlyFans creators are most likely sitting on Discord Servers. These pictures are protected by the DMCA and worldwide copyright law but Discord seems to have zero policy against the distribution of this material on their website.” —Richard Lewis, President of SEO Bounty

What do you think about Discord's news? Do you plan to offer paid memberships? Please share your experience.