Sometimes a digital thumbs up just isn’t enough to express your gratitude, so YouTube is offering a new and premium way to say thank you to creators called Super Thanks.
Formerly known as the viewer applause experiment, Super Thanks is available with four price options—$2, $5, $10, and $50 (or your local currency equivalent). Each time you give financial thanks, you’ll be greeted with a celebratory GIF and earn a distinct color-coded comment to which creators can directly respond.
This marks the latest addition to YouTube’s growing lineup of “paid digital goods.” In 2017, the video platform introduced Super Chat—a highlighted message more likely to catch the creator’s attention during a livestream. Super Stickers, launched two years later, act as colorful reminders that you’re interested in someone’s content.
“Just like Super Chat and Super Stickers, Super Thanks does double duty for creators: keeping their connections with (super) fans meaningful, while also giving them a new way to make money,” YouTube’s chief product officer Neal Mohan wrote in a blog announcement.
Though currently in beta, today’s expansion makes Super Thanks available to thousands of creators and viewers in 68 countries on desktop and mobile devices. Makers can follow online instructions to find out whether the function has been enabled. If it hasn’t, YouTube intends to expand availability to all eligible creators in the Partner Program later this year.
The pandemic has proved positive for many YouTubers. More than 140,000 channels earned money from paid digital goods in December alone, and over 10 million viewers bought their first paid digital goods—Super Chat, Super Stickers, channel memberships—during 2020.
