Discord plans to allow creators to sell downloadable products

Discord plans to give creators a new way to earn money from their communities by selling digital products through one-time purchases. These new “downloadables” could be things like a recipe ebook, a gaming guide, or a digital wallpaper, and the company plans to start experimenting with them “in the coming months,” according to Discord’s Derek Yang. wrote in Tuesday’s blog post, The downloadables will be available for purchase from a server shop, which is also in testing.

The new downloadable and server shops join Discord’s server subscriptions as ways for creators to monetize their servers. Server subscriptions are also improving: The company is adding tier templates to make it easier to decide what subscriptions to offer to your community. (Though Yang’s blog has a reminder that “not every opportunity to generate revenue needs to be a get-rich-quick scheme,” perhaps to deter people from using subscriptions to cash in.)

As part of Tuesday’s announcements, Discord also introduced a new channel type in beta: media channel, These are designed to focus on things like videos, photos, and files, and could be a useful option for communities that want to better split meme dumps from text chats. They are “enabling all community servers with server subscriptions” on Tuesday, Yang wrote.

The growing number of features could make Discord a more attractive platform for building a community. And with people looking for new places to visit given the change in platforms like Twitter and Reddit, these new updates may encourage even more people to jump in.