MUMBAI: For young artists and aspiring entrepreneurs across the globe, YouTube has been nothing short of a revolution. While advertising has been the major source of revenue for YouTube's creator community, the Google-owned site now wants to go beyond ads. The tech giant has started working on new tools to enable creators to make more money.

YouTube's 'Sponsorship' feature has now been rebranded to 'Channel Membership'. Consumers can pay a monthly recurring fee of $4.99 to get unique badges, new emojis, members-only posts in the Community tab, along with access to customised perks offered by creators. Earlier, this feature was limited to select YouTube channels only. This feature will soon be expanded to every eligible channel that commands 100,000 subscribers.

While merchandising may not be a new concept for the YouTube community, the company has partnered with Treespring to help creators design and sell products on the platform. In a tab under the video itself, creators can now offer t-shirts, hats, phone cases or any one of the 20 merchandise items.

To help publishers build better engagement with consumers, YouTube has introduced Premieres, a new way to upload content.

“With Premieres, creators will be able to debut pre-recorded videos as a live moment. When creators choose to release a Premiere, we’ll automatically create a public landing page to build anticipation and hype up new content,” the company said in a blog post.

For the first time ever, creators can use Super Chat and take advantage of Channel Membership perks on traditional YouTube uploads. These were previously available on Live Videos.

“We hope these tools help creators build a stronger community and earn more money while doing it, because when they succeed, the entire YouTube community thrives,” the blog read.

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