Learn more about what you can offer your members and how your viewers experience memberships.
Each channel participating in memberships, including its offerings, is responsible for complying with our terms and policies. These policies include YouTube's Community Guidelines and all relevant laws and regulations.
There are different places in Creator Studio where you can manage and track your memberships programme:
Memberships tab
Once you turn on memberships, you can find this tab in Studio under Earn 
Here you can track:
- Total members: All current members who have access to perks. Includes members who have cancelled but have access to perks for the remainder of their billing period.
- Active members: All members with active subscriptions only. Active subscriptions are calculated by subtracting cancelled members from total members.
- Revenue: You can track earnings for the last billing period and compare with the previous billing period.
- Members by level: Track the number of members (total or active) by level over time.
- Sign-ups and cancellations: See how many users became members or cancelled a membership in the past billing period and compare with the previous billing period.
- Cancellation feedback: Some users give feedback on why they cancelled from our set of predefined multiple choice options. By hovering over 'Cancellations', you can see how users responded when cancelling on your channel.
Managing your members
You can view a list of all your current members that includes:
- Total duration as a member (includes time from all prior periods as a member).
- Last update: Days since the last time that the member joined, rejoined, upgraded or downgraded their membership.
To export a snapshot of this info to CSV, click Download in the upper right-hand corner. Exporting may take a few minutes to complete. You can close this window while you wait.
Collecting info from your members:
By using this third-party IFTTT integration, you can create a customised, secure, member-gated form with your channel members to collect info that will help you to deliver perks. You are responsible for any data collected from members. YouTube cannot access this data.
Managing your perks, levels and prices
Click the Membership offer card to manage and edit your memberships perks and levels. Here you'll find suggestions and best practices for the types of perks that you might want to offer at each price point.
Other cards and tools in the memberships tab:
- Resources: A dynamic card that will display best practices, links to other resources and membership-specific experiments to opt in and out of.
- Recent videos that members joined from: Monitor the top-performing videos that viewers became members on.
- Recent comments by members: Easily find the latest member comments so that you can prioritise replying to them.
- Intro video: Upload a video to display on your membership offer screen. Viewers will see the intro video when they click JOIN to sign up for memberships.
YouTube Analytics
You can also view more data about your members in YTA.
- Audience: Click on YTA
Analytics
- Total and active members
- Members gained
- Members cancelled
- Members lost (cancelled members who lost access to perks as a result of the end of their billing period)
- Revenue: Click on Analytics
- Go to YouTube Studio.
- Select Analytics.
- Select Revenue.
- Find and select the How you make money card.
- Select Memberships for a detailed view of your memberships revenue. You can set a custom time period or filter by video format.
See your members
If you get a new member while you're offline, you won't get a notification. You can see all of your active members, how long they've been a member and their subscriber count on the Memberships tab in YouTube Studio. Members can cancel their membership at any time.
If you're live streaming when a new viewer joins your channel membership, a bright green 'Welcome' message will be sent in live chat. This message will be pinned at the top of the chat for five minutes.
You can also see the total number of members per day in the Audience tab in YouTube Analytics. The 'key metrics card' shows a chart of how many members were gained or lost over time.
- To your video description.
- On cards and end screens in your videos.
Gift memberships let you or your channel members buy the opportunity for viewers to access the perks of a channel membership. You or your channel members can buy gift memberships during live streams or Premieres.
If you offer a membership tier below $5, promotional gift memberships may be available for you to distribute to viewers each month. Promotional gift memberships are free of charge and you don't earn revenue on these gift memberships. Promotional gift memberships are available on the first of each month and do not carry over month to month. You must distribute the promotional gift memberships before you can buy gift memberships for your viewers. You can distribute the promotional gift memberships, in sets of five, the same way that you distribute gift memberships that you buy during live streams or Premieres: to see your promotional gift memberships, go to a live stream or Premiere live chat and select 
Note: Promotional gift memberships are not currently available for brand accounts. Stay tuned as we expand more broadly in the coming months.
When you or channel members buy gift memberships, a countdown ticker will highlight the purchase in live chat for a limited amount of time. The amount of time depends on the purchase amount. If the live chat or live stream ends before the gift is announced, it will still be distributed to the viewers.
Viewers must opt in to be eligible for gift memberships. Once a viewer opts in to allow gifts on your channel, they're eligible to get gift memberships on any current or future gifts on your channel.
You can encourage viewers to opt in for gifts by sharing your unique opt-in URL across your channel and content:
- www.youtube.com/channel/{external_channel_id}/allow_gifts OR
- www.youtube.com/channel/{channel_name}/allow_gifts
You can find your unique external channel ID here.
A gift membership purchase is considered as fulfilled once YouTube distributes the first gift to a viewer. You can find reporting for gift memberships in YouTube Analytics. Select 'Memberships type' to view how many gift memberships were purchased and redeemed during a selected time period.
Set and manage your intro video
Set an intro video for potential membersWhat to know before adding an intro video
- Ads will not run on intro videos.
- Your intro video must follow YouTube's Community Guidelines.
- Your intro video can't have third-party copyright claims.
- Your intro video can't have music claims against it.
- Your intro video can't be set as Made for Kids.
- If you want to mention the specific prices of your levels, be aware that prices can vary depending on platform and country.
How to add or edit an intro video
- Create your intro video and make sure that you publish it as Unlisted.
- Go to studio.youtube.com.
- In the left menu, select Earn
- Click Add intro video in the Your membership offer card.
- To edit or delete an existing intro video, click Edit
next to the intro video in the Your membership offer card.
next to the intro video in the Your membership offer card.Channel membership revenue, pricing and refunds
Revenue share
Revenue reporting
Cancellations, terminations and refunds
If membership is terminated on a channel because of termination by the channel, all active paying members will get a refund of their last payment. Other refundable reasons include removal from the YouTube Partner Programme or as a result of abuse, fraud or breach of our terms or policies. The channel's share of the revenue to be refunded will be deducted from the channel.
FAQ
My viewers say that they can't see the 'Join' button. Why not?- The feature has not been launched on your channel.
- The feature has not been launched in all countries.
- Your video is set as Made for Kids.
- The 'Join' button has not yet been launched on some platforms. Viewers can, however, become members on a desktop. You can still get access to perks on all available platforms if you sign up on a desktop.
- The 'Join' button will only appear on the eligible video watch pages of participating channels. For example, watch pages of videos claimed by certain music partners are not eligible.
- The 'Join' button doesn't surface for unsubscribed viewers on mobile devices. Viewers on mobile devices must subscribe to your channel first for the 'Join' button to surface.
If your viewers can't see the 'Join' button, you can always remind them of these workarounds:
- Remind viewers that they can become a member by clicking on the 'Join' button on your channel homepage.
- Viewers can add '/join' to the end of your channel URL to link directly to your membership offer window.
- You can also add your '/join' link to your video descriptions.
- The member's channel URL
- The name of the member's channel
- A link to the member's profile picture
- When the member joined your channel