YouTube Japan’s Twitter announced that it plans on starting a new membership gifting feature for livestreamers. Right now, this project is only in the alpha stages and is being tested on a small number of streamers before it’s potentially adopted onto the wider platform.
This new feature would allow viewers who are already channel members to gift membership rights to other viewers also watching the stream. Memberships often give users badges, emotes, and other exclusive content that’s otherwise monetarily locked. Channel memberships are a $4.99 monthly cost, though it’s unknown if gifted memberships would be at the same cost or if users can gift multiple memberships.
This potential new feature is most analogous to Twitch’s sub gifting option, which has existed on the platform for several years. The feature allows users to gift subs in several different increments, ranging from one to 100, which are randomly gifted to users in the chat.
For many years, Twitch has been the worldwide leader in livestreaming content and has pioneered many now seemingly integral features to streaming. YouTube’s introduction of gifting features is the latest case of the video hosting website attempting to reach this expected standard for its growing livestreaming division.
Relatively younger than its goliath streaming competitor, YouTube has increasingly invested into the its streaming side and content creators. While still trailing behind Twitch in overall viewership, the website has managed to obtain and retain known creators such as Valkyrae, Ludwig, TimTheTatman, and more.
With this new gifted feature, it’s clear that YouTube is not only looking to simply acquire talent, but to make its streaming content more accessible and familiar to users.
