8 ms·

Discord’s Creator Portal

90 points by paulshen 4y ago

cma 4y ago
What's their cut relative to using Patreon? Edit: "They get 90% of what they charge; Discord takes the other 10% as its fee." https://www.tubefilter.com/2022/06/16/discord-premium-membership-automod-rollout/ https://www.tubefilter.com/2022/06/16/discord-premium-member...
- Trung0246 4y ago
  It's 90/10 according to the 101 subscription post
- moneywoes 4y ago
  What’s Patreons?
  - PaulsWallet 4y ago
    5 to 12% depending on what plan you get.
- AntonyGarand 4y ago
  The interesting part is that it seems like it's a flat 10%, which includes the payment processing fees: > our payment for each purchase will be the price set by you, less ten percent (10%), unless we expressly state otherwise in writing to you. This ten percent will cover transaction costs such as payment processing fees and the cost of providing tools, features, and support described above. This gives them an edge for cheaper subscription over the alternatives, so you can sell a $1 subscription and get $0.9. Other similar platforms (hyper, upgrade.chat) take a fee on top of the payment processors, so you might get 0.30$ base fee + 3% from the payment processor, and an extra 3-6% from the platform itself.
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    That is impressive because it seems like they're eating the 30¢ from the transaction, which is annoying when dealing with microtransactions like your 1 dollar example. But I'm sure due to their market position they make back that money manifold.
malwrar 4y ago
tl;dr it looks like Discord is working to introduce paid servers, channels, etc intended for content creators to monetize fan interaction. The vibe their docs give off makes it feel similar to how Patreon allows you to get exclusive content and chat direct with creators, but it does feel weird putting a direct price tag on participating on an instant messaging app. Discord is pretty explicit about creators governing their tone so users don't feel a free thing is suddenly not free, but this move does feel like they're just going to encourage more and more of the net to be blocked off behind a paywall. What if I run into financial trouble or simply can't afford to access certain high-value communities like AI/Engineering/etc ones? What if this corrupts the culture and makes it harder to find & create indie, fun communities? What does this look like if they expand it to allow toll meters to be attached to more and more of the Discord experience?
- natdempk 4y ago
  I think the way this will work out in practice is basically how the bridges between Patreon + Discord already work, but with better integration to Discord features. Basically the way most of these work today is if you become a Patron you get a role and get added to some private discord channels with other subscribers, but the base server remains accessible to all. This makes sense from a marketing/activity/alignment perspective for everyone and seems likely to continue. Some creators have Discord servers only accessible to subscribers/Patrons already, and there wouldn't be a change there. I think the reality is that nothing really changes here wrt. server operating structures and that a bunch of stuff just becomes more tightly integrated/featured on the Discord side so Discord can make money off it.
  - matai_kolila 4y ago
    My assumption here is that this is built to replace Patreon entirely. "Sub to my Discord or sub to my Patreon to get exclusive content!" eventually becomes, "Sub to my Discord to get exclusive content!" and cuts out Patreon entirely.
    - unity1001 4y ago
pfist 4y ago
This is a new resource that Discord launched alongside Server Subscriptions today. Here are some other relevant links. Launch Blog Post: https://discord.com/blog/server-and-creator-subscriptions https://discord.com/blog/server-and-creator-subscriptions Server Subscriptions FAQ: https://creator-support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/10423011974551-Server-Subscriptions-for-Creators https://creator-support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/104230...
candiddevmike 4y ago
And here come the perverse incentives to make channel discovery via ads or creator content feeds. Pay out 90% but keep creators paying for advertising is a similar model to the app stores.
fire 4y ago
I'm betting we're going to see subscription-only Activities[0] here shortly 0: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4422142836759-Activities-on-Discord https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4422142836759-...
lumenwrites 4y ago
Personally, I'm really excited about this. For two reasons: 1. I love using Discord and building communities there. But it does take a lot of work. A way to monetize some of this stuff is very welcome. Even if I won't end up doing this for my own projects, I like that there's an incentive for people to put a lot of effort into building high quality communities (which I'd be happy to pay to participate in). 2. If this works well, Discord will finally have a good monetization model. Many social networks start out awesome and useful, but then go downhill when it's time to start making money and extracting value from users (think Medium, Quora, etc). Discord is one of the most useful and fun tools I use day to day (both for my work and for my hobbies), and it was kind of concerning that I didn't see a way for them to make money. If they have a way to make profit without turning into an ad-riddled user-hostile dark-pattern-filled mess, it'll be great for everyone.
- candiddevmike 4y ago
  Nitro is how discord makes money today, "creators" don't get a cut from it, instead they or their community pay for discord as a service like every other "creator".
- MattDemers 4y ago
  I mostly dislike how this is adding nothing new to Discord syncing subscriber status from Twitch or Patreon; doing that assigned the subscriber who connected their accounts a role, which could then be used for permissions to access content. This is all that a Discord Subscriber gets (role access to exclusive channels), besides "Premium Emotes", which is nebulous in value. Discord are streamlining the process that wasn't particularly complicated to begin with. I'm imagining someone went "wait, why aren't we getting a piece of that pie?", and this is what they arrived at: make fans and communities need to choose where they put their subscription money to, and hope that enough people decide that Discord is the central venue they experience a community. For Twitch streamers, this might not be as successful as they'd like it to be, if there's more value associated with being a Twitch sub than a Discord sub. Streamers really need to be leaning hard on a Discord-specific product in order to justify a second (or well, primary) subscription, and I don't see a ton of people doing that.
kixiQu 4y ago
A word problem: If it's 90%-10% revenue share, but they have a blogpost (https://discord.com/creators/server-subs-104-price-your-subscription https://discord.com/creators/server-subs-104-price-your-subs...) explaining that you need to shoot to make 110% in revenue of the amount you need to take home before taxes, what percent confidence should one have in their ability to manage creators' funds?
- csande17 4y ago
  ...Have I missed something, or are you mad at them for rounding 1/.9 = 1.111... to "110%" in an article about estimating revenue? Unless you're able to guess the number of subscribers you'll have with 3 significant figures of precision, that seems entirely appropriate.
  - kixiQu 4y ago
    It is always fine for a chat server to silently round numbers. There is no context in which I want a payment processor to silently round numbers. (And I'm not wild about a "haha who even knows how taxes work" joke either)
    - plaguepilled 4y ago
      Its exposition, not documentation. Consider the audience.
freefolks 4y ago
Had this for a few months. It's great but lacking in tools to manage the subscriptions.
Spivak 4y ago
Good lord Discord is gonna eat the world without anyone ever noticing. They somehow managed to make a service that was social network, app delivery platform, group chat, community forums, Tumblr, Reddit, Vent/Mumble, internet radio, customer support channel, Twitch, Spotify group sessions, IRC, and now Patreon. It's so unbelievably slick and well architected and god so freaking fast. Slack has got to be quaking in the boots at this point, the bots on Discord put Slack to shame and the market is realizing it with services pushing Discord integrations before Slack. It took me all of four hours to have a bot up and running that could record all my friends' Spotify history and recommend stuff to them, control my lights, respond to gpt prompts, get build notifications from Gitlab, share my friendgroup Wi-Fi passwords, get Prometheus alerts with working buttons to ack/silence/chatops.
- Karunamon 4y ago
  All they need are slightly better admin controls, SSO, and a switch to disable anything "fun" in the client (maybe settable via a group policy if there feeling froggy), and Slack has literally nothing to offer. This is a relatively trivial amount of engineering work to have feature parity
  - clnq 4y ago
    Slack does feel like slower Discord with fun disabled.
bpanon 4y ago
Discord is such a terrible name. Who wants to create Discord? Or be a Discord creator?
- FamosoRandom 4y ago
  Some men just want to watch the world burn
- darthrupert 4y ago
  Not a fan of brutal honesty?
  - bpanon 4y ago
    Touche

90 points by paulshen 4y ago

cma 4y ago

What's their cut relative to using Patreon? Edit: "They get 90% of what they charge; Discord takes the other 10% as its fee." https://www.tubefilter.com/2022/06/16/discord-premium-membership-automod-rollout/ https://www.tubefilter.com/2022/06/16/discord-premium-member...

Trung0246 4y ago
It's 90/10 according to the 101 subscription post
moneywoes 4y ago
What’s Patreons?
- PaulsWallet 4y ago
  5 to 12% depending on what plan you get.
AntonyGarand 4y ago
The interesting part is that it seems like it's a flat 10%, which includes the payment processing fees: > our payment for each purchase will be the price set by you, less ten percent (10%), unless we expressly state otherwise in writing to you. This ten percent will cover transaction costs such as payment processing fees and the cost of providing tools, features, and support described above. This gives them an edge for cheaper subscription over the alternatives, so you can sell a $1 subscription and get $0.9. Other similar platforms (hyper, upgrade.chat) take a fee on top of the payment processors, so you might get 0.30$ base fee + 3% from the payment processor, and an extra 3-6% from the platform itself.
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  That is impressive because it seems like they're eating the 30¢ from the transaction, which is annoying when dealing with microtransactions like your 1 dollar example. But I'm sure due to their market position they make back that money manifold.

malwrar 4y ago

tl;dr it looks like Discord is working to introduce paid servers, channels, etc intended for content creators to monetize fan interaction. The vibe their docs give off makes it feel similar to how Patreon allows you to get exclusive content and chat direct with creators, but it does feel weird putting a direct price tag on participating on an instant messaging app. Discord is pretty explicit about creators governing their tone so users don't feel a free thing is suddenly not free, but this move does feel like they're just going to encourage more and more of the net to be blocked off behind a paywall. What if I run into financial trouble or simply can't afford to access certain high-value communities like AI/Engineering/etc ones? What if this corrupts the culture and makes it harder to find & create indie, fun communities? What does this look like if they expand it to allow toll meters to be attached to more and more of the Discord experience?

natdempk 4y ago
I think the way this will work out in practice is basically how the bridges between Patreon + Discord already work, but with better integration to Discord features. Basically the way most of these work today is if you become a Patron you get a role and get added to some private discord channels with other subscribers, but the base server remains accessible to all. This makes sense from a marketing/activity/alignment perspective for everyone and seems likely to continue. Some creators have Discord servers only accessible to subscribers/Patrons already, and there wouldn't be a change there. I think the reality is that nothing really changes here wrt. server operating structures and that a bunch of stuff just becomes more tightly integrated/featured on the Discord side so Discord can make money off it.
- matai_kolila 4y ago
  My assumption here is that this is built to replace Patreon entirely. "Sub to my Discord or sub to my Patreon to get exclusive content!" eventually becomes, "Sub to my Discord to get exclusive content!" and cuts out Patreon entirely.
  - unity1001 4y ago

pfist 4y ago

This is a new resource that Discord launched alongside Server Subscriptions today. Here are some other relevant links. Launch Blog Post: https://discord.com/blog/server-and-creator-subscriptions https://discord.com/blog/server-and-creator-subscriptions Server Subscriptions FAQ: https://creator-support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/10423011974551-Server-Subscriptions-for-Creators https://creator-support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/104230...

candiddevmike 4y ago

And here come the perverse incentives to make channel discovery via ads or creator content feeds. Pay out 90% but keep creators paying for advertising is a similar model to the app stores.

fire 4y ago

I'm betting we're going to see subscription-only Activities[0] here shortly 0: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4422142836759-Activities-on-Discord https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4422142836759-...

lumenwrites 4y ago

Personally, I'm really excited about this. For two reasons: 1. I love using Discord and building communities there. But it does take a lot of work. A way to monetize some of this stuff is very welcome. Even if I won't end up doing this for my own projects, I like that there's an incentive for people to put a lot of effort into building high quality communities (which I'd be happy to pay to participate in). 2. If this works well, Discord will finally have a good monetization model. Many social networks start out awesome and useful, but then go downhill when it's time to start making money and extracting value from users (think Medium, Quora, etc). Discord is one of the most useful and fun tools I use day to day (both for my work and for my hobbies), and it was kind of concerning that I didn't see a way for them to make money. If they have a way to make profit without turning into an ad-riddled user-hostile dark-pattern-filled mess, it'll be great for everyone.

candiddevmike 4y ago
Nitro is how discord makes money today, "creators" don't get a cut from it, instead they or their community pay for discord as a service like every other "creator".
MattDemers 4y ago
I mostly dislike how this is adding nothing new to Discord syncing subscriber status from Twitch or Patreon; doing that assigned the subscriber who connected their accounts a role, which could then be used for permissions to access content. This is all that a Discord Subscriber gets (role access to exclusive channels), besides "Premium Emotes", which is nebulous in value. Discord are streamlining the process that wasn't particularly complicated to begin with. I'm imagining someone went "wait, why aren't we getting a piece of that pie?", and this is what they arrived at: make fans and communities need to choose where they put their subscription money to, and hope that enough people decide that Discord is the central venue they experience a community. For Twitch streamers, this might not be as successful as they'd like it to be, if there's more value associated with being a Twitch sub than a Discord sub. Streamers really need to be leaning hard on a Discord-specific product in order to justify a second (or well, primary) subscription, and I don't see a ton of people doing that.

kixiQu 4y ago

A word problem: If it's 90%-10% revenue share, but they have a blogpost (https://discord.com/creators/server-subs-104-price-your-subscription https://discord.com/creators/server-subs-104-price-your-subs...) explaining that you need to shoot to make 110% in revenue of the amount you need to take home before taxes, what percent confidence should one have in their ability to manage creators' funds?

csande17 4y ago
...Have I missed something, or are you mad at them for rounding 1/.9 = 1.111... to "110%" in an article about estimating revenue? Unless you're able to guess the number of subscribers you'll have with 3 significant figures of precision, that seems entirely appropriate.
- kixiQu 4y ago
  It is always fine for a chat server to silently round numbers. There is no context in which I want a payment processor to silently round numbers. (And I'm not wild about a "haha who even knows how taxes work" joke either)
  - plaguepilled 4y ago
    Its exposition, not documentation. Consider the audience.

freefolks 4y ago

Had this for a few months. It's great but lacking in tools to manage the subscriptions.

Spivak 4y ago

Good lord Discord is gonna eat the world without anyone ever noticing. They somehow managed to make a service that was social network, app delivery platform, group chat, community forums, Tumblr, Reddit, Vent/Mumble, internet radio, customer support channel, Twitch, Spotify group sessions, IRC, and now Patreon. It's so unbelievably slick and well architected and god so freaking fast. Slack has got to be quaking in the boots at this point, the bots on Discord put Slack to shame and the market is realizing it with services pushing Discord integrations before Slack. It took me all of four hours to have a bot up and running that could record all my friends' Spotify history and recommend stuff to them, control my lights, respond to gpt prompts, get build notifications from Gitlab, share my friendgroup Wi-Fi passwords, get Prometheus alerts with working buttons to ack/silence/chatops.

Karunamon 4y ago
All they need are slightly better admin controls, SSO, and a switch to disable anything "fun" in the client (maybe settable via a group policy if there feeling froggy), and Slack has literally nothing to offer. This is a relatively trivial amount of engineering work to have feature parity
- clnq 4y ago
  Slack does feel like slower Discord with fun disabled.

bpanon 4y ago

Discord is such a terrible name. Who wants to create Discord? Or be a Discord creator?

FamosoRandom 4y ago
Some men just want to watch the world burn
darthrupert 4y ago
Not a fan of brutal honesty?
- bpanon 4y ago
  Touche