A new way to earn money with YouTube Gaming

Starting today, we’re opening up a new way to earn extra money on your channel and better help you connect with your fans on YouTube Gaming: sponsorships!

With sponsorships, fans can purchase digital goods directly from your channel and support you via monthly recurring payments of $4.99 USD (local pricing applies). Sponsors get cool insider perks, such as a custom badge for live chat that will help them stand out from the crowd and custom emoji. These badges and emoji are designed by you for your fans. As you gain more sponsors, you will unlock more emoji to be used on your channel. You can upload and use these in real-time as you pass sponsorship milestones.



Sponsors also get access to sponsors-only live chat and immunity from slow mode. You’ll also be able to set up additional perks through 3rd-party services, such as on-stream alerts that you’ve received a new subscriber via Streamlabs or an exclusive Discord sponsors-only server where fans can connect and chat together.





Throughout our early tests of YouTube Gaming sponsorships, we’ve seen some incredible successes. For example, GameAttack makes most of their channel revenue via sponsorships and Super Chat. Rocket Beans earned 1,500 sponsors in their first day. And ONE_shot_GURL’s monthly celebratory wall of sponsors is getting so full, it’s running out of room.

Sponsorships are broadly available to all eligible creators on the YouTube Gaming app. So if your channel is eligible, you can enable it yourself today at youtube.com/features and immediately begin growing your sponsorship base. We’ll also be testing out another version of sponsorships with a handful of non-gaming creators on the main YouTube app. Check out Lauren Fairweather's or Que Diabos’ channel, and sign up here if you're interested in trying it out for your channel.

Whether your channel is still new or you’ve been a creator for years, we want you to be successful, and sponsorships is part of a wider effort to help build your business on YouTube. As we focus on growing your revenue through YouTube Red, Super Chat, and now sponsorships, we're bidding farewell to a service we launched in 2013 called paid channels. This service offered monthly subscriptions for some channels, but with less than 1% of creators using it today, it never achieved popularity with creators or users.

Between all the trials, raids, and meteor strikes, the gaming community on YouTube continues to grow. We’re excited to see how your creativity with sponsorships can help you both build stronger communities and bigger businesses.

Barbara Macdonald, Product Manager, recently live streamed Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle