How Logan Paul and Bryce Hall are putting a price tag on their fans Maverick\/PAUPaywalls and subscription models are heavily-debated features of online media but some of the biggest online entertainers are utilizing these features. Are they leaving money on the table or actually monetizing better than their peers? The likes of divisive YouTuber-turned-boxer Logan Paul and TikTok star Bryce Hall both have their own private, paywalled clubs that grant perks to fans who choose to buy-in. Besides the fact they use the same white-label service, which I\u2019ll touch on later, they\u2019re opting to forgo popular subscription services such as Patreon in favor of entirely owning their audience. Subscription services are nothing new, just think of magazines and newspaper from before the internet was around. Paywalls are prominent in the media landscape to this very day, too, with the likes of The Financial Times and Insider charging users to access their journalism. The early stages of internet entertainment, as opposed to journalism, has been widely-accessible and, importantly, free. YouTube is a great example. There are now premium options available for an improved experience, but anybody with access to the internet can enjoy billions of hours of content at no expense. Owning your audience The emergence of platforms such as Patreon was important as they offered a reliable method of monetizing audiences built off of free content and open platforms. There are alternatives to Patreon that provide a platform to quickly devise their own subscription service, but it\u2019s the go-to for the majority of creators and the easiest to point to for the sake of comparison. Read More: How does Addison Rae make money? – What Paul and Hall, among others, are doing with their own \u2018fan clubs\u2019 right now is attempting to own their distribution channels, play by their own rules, and directly put a price on their fans. They\u2019re attempting to work around the open, free nature of online entertainment. A service like Patreon combines the expected features of a paywall with social media characteristics: a lack of custom domains, a discoverability feature to find creators, the same bog-standard design for each channel, and so on. It\u2019s clear that you\u2019re simply on a platform instead of owning your own club. With Paul\u2019s Maverick Club and Hall\u2019s Party Animal University, they have complete control of the experience. They don\u2019t have to have subscription tiers or to conform to the wishes of another platform, they\u2019re free to build a space that is uniquely theirs and make it a true, unwavering extension of their brands. The two aforementioned clubs feel like community hubs, a place for like-minded individuals with a common interest to gather. This means that being involved feels less transactional and more intimate \u2014 you\u2019re not just paying to view additional content, you\u2019re venturing deeper into the world of your favorite creator. The feeling seems to be important here. Now, we\u2019re not privy to the numbers behind these clubs. We don\u2019t know if they\u2019re truly working for either creator, but the extravagant perks suggest that these communities are worth investing in. Paul gives away $10,000 in cash on a monthly basis and Hall offers to fly random members out to the Sway House to meet him and his friends (who can really be referred to as co-stars.) Read More: Logan Paul gets lucky with $2m Pokemon cards – When a creator adopts a monetization model such as this, everything changes. Their free content, such as the YouTube and TikTok videos that helped them to make names for themselves, somewhat become marketing material. While they can still monetize such content, AdSense income is likely to be much lower than the amounts they can rake in through their clubs. They continue with free content in an effort to remain relevant and even grow their followings further, but viewers are now in a funnel. They want to convert free viewers into avid fans and ensure they pay directly to support them further. They can promise uncensored, true-to-self content on their paywalled content that simply can\u2019t exist on public platforms like YouTube and TikTok. It\u2019s enticing, and that\u2019s good marketing. To paywall or not to paywall? There are interesting arguments for and against using paywalls as a content creator but it\u2019s hard to deny the allure of implementing one. It provides a stable income for creators, something that is attractive if they\u2019ve been relying solely on turbulent ad revenue and brand partnerships. It also provides data to measure and process so they can further understand their audience, and it allows you to gather information from their viewers. Read More: Fans slam David Dobrik\u2019s VIEWS podcast – They gain access to names, ages, contact details, and even interests in some cases. If you have the email address of somebody you know is a big fan of yours, you can easily market to them in other ways. There are endless ways to re-engage with people you know are interested in what you\u2019re doing: \u201cWant an exclusive discount on merch?\u201d, \u201cDid you know I\u2019ll be touring in your city next month?\u201d, and \u201cHave you seen this amazing new collaboration I did with X?\u201d, for example. While the likes of MrBeast and David Dobrik are monetizing efficiently through large-scale video premises that brands want to be a part of, not everybody is able to execute such strategies. It\u2019s not easy to monetize content as a smaller creator and paywalls can provide a good source of income through just a few subscriptions alone. Though titans of online entertainment like Paul and Hall are going down this route, it\u2019s also worth considering for up-and-coming creators or those who simply aren\u2019t in the top 0.1% but still have a healthy following. If somebody can manage to get 100 paying subscribers at a cost of $10, then that\u2019s $1,000 per month being made. On top of AdSense and brand deals, two of the most common income streams for video creators, affording bills is less of a challenge. It can be a method of making full-time content creation viable for those who aren\u2019t at the top. \u2018Community\u2019 may be a buzzword in online media, and for good reason, but some of the top creators are not only fostering their own but monetizing them effectively. We\u2019ll see new, exciting methods of generating income online in the future but there\u2019s no reason to suspect that paywalls won\u2019t be a big part of that for years to come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
How Logan Paul and Bryce Hall are putting a price tag on their fans Maverick\/PAUPaywalls and subscription models are heavily-debated features of online media but some of the biggest online entertainers are utilizing these features. Are they leaving money on the table or actually monetizing better than their peers? The likes of divisive YouTuber-turned-boxer Logan […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21939"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21939\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}