SEO
YouTube Adds New Way To Make Money With Gifted Memberships

YouTube gives creators another way to earn revenue directly from their audience with membership gifting, a feature comparable to gifted subscriptions on Twitch.
This will allow viewers to buy channel memberships for other viewers.
For viewers, it’s a way to support their favorite creators in a way that gives something extra to their community.
A beta version of Channel Memberships Gifting is rolling out to a small group of creators to start, and will be expanded to more channels over the coming months.
If you’re interested in getting access to the feature early you can express interest by submitting a form linked to at the bottom of this article.
YouTube Channel Membership Gifting
Monetized YouTube channels have the option to earn revenue by offering memberships to users.
A channel membership grants perks such as special icons that show up in a creator’s comment section, members-only livestreams, and more. It’s similar to subscriptions, or “subs,” on steaming platform Twitch.
Prior to the rollout of membership gifting, users could only buy memberships for themselves. That meant, at most, users could buy one membership per month.
With membership gifting, channel members can buy a set number of memberships [5, 10, 20] in a single purchase. YouTube will “gift” out those memberships to other viewers.
Viewers who receive a gift memberships get 1 month of access to your channel membership perks. Recipients don’t have to pay anything, and creators receive the usual revenue share from each transaction.
How Does Membership Gifting Work?
Gifted channel memberships can be purchased on desktop during a creator’s livestream. Click the $ button next to the live chat to purchase gift memberships on live streams.
Viewers have to opt-in to be eligible to receive gifts on a channel. During the Beta, users can opt-in by clicking ‘Allow Gifts’ when prompted.
YouTube distributes gift memberships to viewers based on how much they interact with your channel. Loyal viewers are more likely to receive gift memberships than first-time viewers.
Viewers get notified with a personal live chat message and email if they receive a gift membership. A gifted memberships is non-recurring and the recipient doesn’t incur any fees.
Gifted Memberships A Boon To YouTube Creators?
Given the popularity of Twitch’s gifted subs, membership gifting has the potential to boost earnings in a noticeable way for people who stream on YouTube.
If you look at the breakdown of subscriptions for popular Twitch streamers, you can see gifted subs make up roughly 5% to 10% of their total active subscriptions.
How Can Creators Sell Memberships?
I reached out to Greg Jarboe, president of SEO-PR and author of YouTube and Video Marketing, for his take on this update and example of how creators can make money with subscriptions.
Jarboe’s take is below:
Channel Memberships is just one of several options that YouTube Partners now have. Other ones include:
- Ad revenue sharing.
- Selling branded merchandise.
- Super Chat and Super Stickers.
- Premium revenue sharing.
So, Memberships Gifting will be an interesting option for the small percentage of content creators who are currently making money with channel memberships. Who are they? Example include:
- Rachana Ranada, a Chartered Accountant in India, who is helping viewers learn more about financial literacy. She has earned over $100,00 offering memberships.
- Prince Ohakam, a gaming creator better known as Prince Charming, is using channel memberships. He offers members the opportunity to play live video games with him. He also offers live streams, videos, posts, and custom emojis.
- Anna Yakimenko, a Russian fashion consultant based in Milan, uses channel memberships to offer her audience discounts on merchandise, exclusive live streams, and customized fashion advice.
Now, channel memberships aren’t for everyone, so gifting them will be of interest to relatively few content creators. But, if they help to keep the creator economy healthy and diverse, then they should be considered a great tool in the toolbox.
Channels interested in getting early access to this feature can fill out a request form.
Source: YouTube Help
Featured Image: Tada Images/Shutterstock
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SEO
8 Pillar Page Examples to Get Inspired By

Pillar pages are high-level introductions to a topic. They then link to other pages, which are usually more detailed guides about parts of the main topic.
Altogether, they form a content hub.
But not all pillar pages look the same.
In this guide, we’ll look at eight examples of pillar pages to get your creative juices flowing.
Key stats
Estimated organic traffic: 1,200
Backlinks: 6,900
Referring domains: 899
This is our very own pillar page, covering the broad topic of search engine optimization (SEO).
Why I like it
Besides the fact that I’m biased, I like the custom design we created for this page, which makes it different from the articles on our blog.
Even though the design is custom, our pillar page is still a pretty classic “hub and spoke” style pillar page. We’ve broken the topic down neatly into six different chapters and internally linked to guides we’ve created about them. There are also custom animations when you hover over each chapter:
We’ve also added a glossary section that comes with a custom illustration of the SERPs. We have explanations of what each element means, with internal links to more detailed content:
Finally, it links to another “pillar page”: our SEO glossary.
Takeaway
Consider creating a custom design for your pillar page so that it stands out.
Key stats
Estimated organic traffic: 92,200
Backlinks: 21,600
Referring domains: 1,700
Diet Doctor is a health company focusing on low-carb diets. Its pillar page is a comprehensive guide on the keto diet.
Why I like it
On the surface, it doesn’t exactly look like a pillar page; it looks like every other post on the Diet Doctor site. But that’s perfectly fine. It’s simply a different approach—you don’t have to call out the fact that it’s a pillar page.
Diet Doctor’s guide is split into 10 different sections with links to its own resources. The links bring you to different types of content (not just blog posts but videos too).
Unlike the classic pillar page, Diet Doctor’s guide goes into enough detail for anyone who is casually researching the keto diet. But it also links to further resources for anyone who’s interested in doing additional research.
Takeaway
Pillar pages need not always just be text and links. Make it multimedia: You can add videos and images and even link to your own multimedia resources (e.g., a video course).
Key stats
Estimated organic traffic: 5,600
Backlinks: 2,800
Referring domains: 247
Wine Folly is a content site devoted to wine knowledge and appreciation. Its pillar page, as expected, is about wine.
Why I like it
Wine Folly’s pillar page is a classic example of a “hub and spoke” style pillar page—split into multiple sections, with some supporting text, and then internal links to other resources that support each subsection.
This page doesn’t just serve as a pillar page for ranking purposes, though. Given that it ranks well and receives quite a significant amount of search traffic, the page also has a call to action (CTA) to Wine Folly’s book:
Takeaway
While most websites design pillar pages for ranking, you can also use them for other purposes: capture email addresses, sell a book, pitch your product, etc.
Key stats
Estimated organic traffic: 11,100
Backlinks: 3,400
Referring domains: 457
Yoga Journal is an online and offline magazine. Its pillar page is an A-Z directory of yoga poses.
Why I like it
Yoga Journal’s pillar page is straightforward and simple. List down all possible yoga poses (in both their English and Sanskrit names) in a table form and link to them.
Since it’s listed in alphabetical order, it’s useful for anyone who knows the name of a particular pose and is interested in learning more.
What I also like is that Yoga Journal has added an extra column on the type of pose each yoga pose belongs to. If we click on any of the pose types, we’re directed to a category page where you can find similar kinds of poses:
Takeaway
The A-Z format can be a good format for your pillar page if the broad topic you’re targeting fits the style (e.g., dance moves, freestyle football tricks, etc.).
Key stats
Estimated organic traffic: 115,200
Backlinks: 3,200
Referring domains: 860
Atlassian is a software company. You’ve probably heard of its products: Jira, Confluence, Trello, etc. Its pillar page is on agile development.
Why I like it
Atlassian’s pillar page is split into different topics related to agile development. It then has internal links to each topic—both as a sticky table of contents and card-style widgets after the introduction:
I also like the “Up next” feature at the bottom of the pillar page, which makes it seem like an online book rather than a page.
Takeaway
Consider adding a table of contents to your pillar page.
Key stats
Estimated organic traffic: 114,400
Backlinks: 2,900
Referring domains: 592
Muscle and Strength’s pillar page is a massive database linking to various categories of workouts.
Why I like it
Calling it a pillar page seems to be an understatement. Muscle and Strength’s free workouts page appears to be more like a website.
When you open the page, you’ll see that it’s neatly split into multiple categories, such as “workouts for men,” “workouts for women,” “biceps,” “abs,” etc.




Clicking through to any of them leads us to a category page containing all sorts of workouts:
Compared to the other pillar pages on this list, where they’re linking to other subpages, Muscle and Strength’s pillar page links to other category pages, which then link to their subpages, i.e., its massive archive of free workouts.
Takeaway
Content databases, such as the one above, are a huge undertaking for a pillar page but can be worth it if the broad topic you’re targeting fits a format like this. Ideally, the topic should be about something where the content for it is ever-growing (e.g., workout plans, recipes, email templates, etc.).
Key stats
Estimated organic traffic: 39,100
Backlinks: 1,100
Referring domains: 308
Tofugu is a site about learning Japanese. And its pillar page is about, well, learning Japanese.
Why I like it
This is an incredible (and yes, ridiculously good) guide to learning Japanese from scratch. It covers every stage you’ll go through as a complete beginner—from knowing no Japanese to having intermediate proficiency in the language.
Unlike other pillar pages where information is usually scarce and simply links out to further resources, this page holds nothing back. Under each section, there is great detail about what that section is, why it’s important, how it works, and even an estimated time of how long that stage takes to complete.
Another interesting aspect is how Tofugu has structured its internal links as active CTAs. Rather than “Learn more” or “Read more,” it’s all about encouraging users to do a task and completing that stage.
Takeaway
Two takeaways here:
- Pillar pages can be ridiculously comprehensive. It depends on the topic you’re targeting and how competitive it is.
- CTAs can be more exciting than merely just “Read more.”




Key stats
Estimated organic traffic: 890
Backlinks: 4,100
Referring domains: 1,100
Zapier allows users to connect multiple software products together via “zaps.” It’s a 100% remote company, and its pillar page is about remote work.
Why I like it
Zapier’s pillar page is basically like Wine Folly’s pillar page. Break a topic into subsections, add a couple of links of text, and then add internal links to further resources.
In the examples above, we’ve seen all sorts of execution for pillar pages. There are those with custom designs and others that are crazily comprehensive.
But sometimes, all a pillar page needs is a simple design with links.
Takeaway
If you already have a bunch of existing content on your website, you can create a simple pillar page like this to organize your content for your readers.
Keep learning
Inspired by these examples and want to create your own pillar page? Learn how to successfully do so with these two guides:
Any questions or comments? Let me know on Twitter.
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