According to streaming star Rachell Hofstetter aka Valkyrae, YouTube gaming platform is working on its own version of Twitch Prime, as well as gifted subs.
Valkyrae of YouTube Gaming and co-owner of 100 Thieves revealed in a recent live stream that the platform is working on a way for viewers to give channel memberships to one another, as well as “some sort of Prime that’s not a Prime.”
Valkyrae didn’t provide any other information about what users may anticipate from the features when they launch, but we’re guessing that gifted memberships will be very similar to Twitch’s subscription gifting system.
For those unfamiliar with Twitch, subscription gifting is a popular way for fans to show their support for their favorite creators. Users can buy one-month subscriptions to a creator’s channel for $4.99 apiece and present them to particular users or let Twitch automatically gift them to members of the creator’s community. This is beneficial to creators because they are paid the same percentage of revenue from the subscription as before, plus it’s possible that the gift receiver will enjoy being subscribed and will continue to subscribe on their own expense for more than one month.
Valkyrae is referring to Twitch’s parent company, Amazon, when she says “Prime that’s not a Prime.” More than 200 million people have signed up for Amazon Prime, which costs $8.99 or $12.99 per month – depending on your membership tier – and includes benefits such as faster shipping, access to Amazon’s vast library of audio and video content, and Twitch Prime.
Twitch Prime offers a similar set of perks, such as free video games and in-game content–but maybe most crucially for our purposes, it includes one free Twitch channel membership every month.
It’s unclear what YouTube’s Prime counterpart would look like, but if it’s anything like Twitch Prime, YouTube might utilize it to give away free channel memberships in order to attract more people to use the membership and/or membership gifting systems. We’ll have to wait and see if YouTube’s new Prime-inspired subscription incorporates any of these features or takes a different approach, but the company has shown in the past that it listens to user requests.