Why I'm STOPPING my YouTube Memberships

Sharing exactly why I am turning off YouTube Memberships on my channel, and walking you through the entire disable process in real time! This video is essential if you are monetized, interested in recurring income, or considering YouTube memberships. I have 3 big problems with the feature, focusing on the split call-to-action (Subscribe vs Join button), hiding my best videos behind a paywall, and poor user experience of member-only videos in your feed. Full step-by-step tutorial on how to safely disable memberships and why I choose subscriber growth over recurring membership income. Is this a good move? 

Why I'm STOPPING my YouTube Memberships



TRANSCRIPT: (CLICK PLAY ON THE VIDEO ABOVE)

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I am turning off my YouTube memberships on my channel, but I'm also sharing with you why I'm ending YouTube memberships. And I'm doing that in real time so you can follow along. Because if you're not monetized and interested in how you can earn money here on YouTube, or maybe you have memberships and are thinking about this too, for many creators, memberships work brilliantly. It's a way to make a paid exclusive community with reliable recurring income. For me, memberships are a great space to make less formal and quick to make videos, the more experimental stuff, but there's just something that's not working for me. There are many problems that I have with the membership feature, and this is why I'm turning it off now. So, the first problem and probably the biggest right now, if you look at my channel page or videos where you'd usually see the single subscribe button, I was shocked that instead you see a big fat join button. For me, this is a split call to action, which means a new viewer is being asked to do more than one thing. I think my number one priority right now is hitting 100,000 subscribers. It's purely a vanity metric, I know, but it's important to me. The join button, no matter how great the perks are, and we'll get on to that problem in a minute, the join button, I think, pulls focus from what I want the viewer to do and from growing my free subscriber base. And it turns out that is quite important to me. The second problem is hiding my best work behind a pay wall. The whole purpose of this channel, my whole reason for doing it is to encourage as many people as possible, you to make more videos here on YouTube. When I turned YouTube memberships on, I suddenly realized that all the videos I'm making for members only are all videos I actually want as many people as possible to see. By making the videos exclusive, I'm stopping them from doing the work that I want them to do out in the world. I don't want my videos hidden. I think I want them out there helping people. Which brings us on to problem number three, which is how members only videos are presented in viewers feeds. My members only videos and posts appear in your YouTube feed. You might see a great thumbnail if I've, you know, managed to put some effort into it and you click on it and then you're hit with a pay to see screen. For me, I think that's a frustrating user experience. Even worse, that's one impression, one thumbnail that could have been used instead to promote the videos that I want to be seen. All of this works really well for other creators, but having to build up a whole library of videos that no one's watching in the hope that one day it might equal what I would have earned with Google AdSense is a big ask for me. I'm already working for nothing on this. So then to do that again from scratch with no upside for potentially a lot of work, it it just felt like one push too far. I know, I get it. You've got to speculate to accumulate, but I can only make so many videos per month. To then make even more videos or make fewer that instantly pay so I can make the members only videos, it's just too much for me. Your experience may vary and you may have a channel with hundreds of people wanting to pay you directly every month. I just don't think my channel is there yet. Which means let's turn off the YouTube memberships right now. I'm in YouTube studio on a desktop and we are going to click on the earn tab on the left hand side here. These are all the features that I have switched on for my monetized channel. If I click on memberships, and this has been enabled for about five or 6 months now, you can see the hundreds of dollars I'm earning from the thousands of members I've managed to attract to my channel. I did have lots of videos and posts up. I've been slowly removing them from the from the memberships. To end YouTube memberships for your channel, at time of recording, the option is slightly hidden. I'll put a link to the YouTube help article in the description for the latest guidance. All we have to do is click on these three dots next to your memberships offer. Then click on disable channel memberships. This brings up a warning. If you do, you will lose all of your members and any future revenue that you might receive from channel memberships. This action can't be undone. I will tick the box to say I understand and want to turn off memberships for all my fans, all my thousands of fans there. Then we will click on the turn off button. Oh, it's thinking about it. There you go. So, it's reset itself to the splash page that we had before we started memberships. Grow your community and earn monthly. And if you want to restart memberships, I think yeah, you could just go through the process again. I have a video down in the description that walks you through the entire memberships setup process. YouTube will automatically refund members for their last month's payment if their billing cycle isn't complete. I'm really excited about this because it means I can finally release these hidden videos and get those views and watch time and revenue, but it also helps me feel okay about doing more experimental quick turnaround videos in future. Are YouTube memberships something that work for you? Let me know down in the comments below or to just say hi and thank you for hitting the thumbs up button or the subscribe button. It really helps me to keep this channel going and means far more to me than a monthly subscription. And right here is what YouTube knows you want to be watching next.

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