If you’ve ended up here, chances are you’ve started a Discord server, built up a community of active users, and now you’re wondering how to monetize the audience you built.
Many creators and server admins/owners wonder how to monetize a Discord server, and if that is even possible. Well, it is! In this post, we’ll cover two ways to do it: With Discord premium memberships and integrations.
#1: Discord Premium Memberships
Discord’s new features allow creators and server owners to monetize their Discord servers, and users to support their favorite communities. Indeed, Discord premium memberships involve users paying a monthly price to access specific channels or entire servers. Additionally, it allows server owners to create tiered membership levels and view analytics on users’ engagement.
This new feature allows you to monetize your Discord server in a way that’s fully native to Discord and don’t depend on any integration. Creators get to keep 90 percent of all revenue (while Discord takes the remaining 10 percent as a fee). You can charge anywhere from $2.99 to $99.99 per month for each tier.
But, what is Discord premium membership? These are, simply put, monthly subscriptions to a server. As a server owner, you can divide memberships into 1-3 tiers, and each tier can have diverse descriptions, benefits, and pricing.
However, Discord premium memberships are a new feature, which it’s still in beta. Discord announced this feature in late 2021 when it was only a closed experiment with a small group of communities. In mid-2022, they incorporated more communities to test the feature further, but they haven’t yet fully launched it and it’s only available to some US-based servers.
On the other hand, you can monetize a Discord server with a Patreon integration. This allows Patreon subscribers to get special perks and benefits on the community’s Discord server. Let’s see how this works.
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#2: Patreon Discord Integration
Discord has integrations with many platforms, such as YouTube, Twitch, and Patreon. You can integrate your Discord server with Patreon, and this way your Patreon subscribers will get exclusive access to certain parts of the Discord server.
1. Create the desired roles on the Discord server
To begin with, you need to create the roles you want to link to your Patreon tiers. To do this, right-click on your server’s icon, hover over ‘Server Settings’, and then click on ‘Roles’.
Then, simply click on the ‘Create Role‘ button. From there, you can give your role a name (I recommend the roles’ names be the same as your Patreon tiers). Make sure you give the role the necessary permissions and access to channels within the server.
Now repeat the process and create one role per Patreon tier.
Related 👉 How to Make Discord Reaction Roles
2. Edit tiers on Patreon
Now we need to go to Patreon. First, login into your Patreon account, head to the left sidebar navigation, and click on ‘My page‘. Then, click the ‘…‘ button and select ‘Edit tiers‘.
3. Connecting to Discord
Next, click on the pencil icon that appears at the top right corner of the first tier you’d like to connect with Discord.
On the ‘Edit tier‘ page, scroll down to the bottom and click on the ‘Advanced‘ tab to show more options. There, under ‘Discord access‘ you will see a ‘Connect to Discord’ button.
When you click on ‘Connect to Discord’, a pop-up window will appear, prompting you to log in into your Discord account. Once you log in and authorize Patreon’s bot into the server, click on ‘Save Tier’ and refresh the page.
Note: when authorizing Patreon’s bot into the server, make sure the ‘Manage Roles’ and ‘Create Invite’ permissions are selected.
4. Assign Discord roles to your Patreon tiers
Now, go back to your Discord server and enter ‘Server Settings’ > ‘Roles’ again. The next step is to drag the newly created ‘Patreon’ role above all other roles in your server, to ensure the bot can assign the roles you designate to your patrons.
Back to Patreon, on the ‘Edit tier’ page, under the ‘Advanced’ tab, check the ‘Give patrons access to selected Discord roles‘ box. Then, you will be able to select the role you want patrons in that tier to have.
You must repeat this process for all tiers, selecting the Discord role you want each tier to have. After this process, when a new or existing Patreon subscriber links their Discord account, the roles assigned for each tier will automatically be assigned to them. Additionally, if they cease to be a Patreon subscriber, their Discord roles will be automatically removed.
To fruitfully monetize Discord server, you must first grow the community and have a strong base of engaged members. Chech out these 10 ways to make your new Discord server popular and start collecting the fruits of your Discord monetization efforts!
Keep watching more ways to monetize Discord 👇
