YouTube

The short version

YouTube isn't a community platform. It's the biggest audience on earth with a comments section, a community tab, paid memberships, and now a free Courses feature with worksheets attached.

We've listed it anyway, because of where it's going. In the last couple of years YouTube has added quizzes to community posts, voice replies in comments, PDF attachments on course videos, and the plumbing to attach more. Each one is a small step toward "you don't need to send your audience off-platform to teach them." Our bet is that the community features get the same treatment.

For now: a place to find your people and keep them watching. Not a place to run a membership business that you own.

Pricing we checked

Free. There's no plan for creators. You need to be in the YouTube Partner Program to earn, which has its own thresholds (watch hours or Shorts views, subscriber counts) that YouTube changes periodically. Memberships need you to be in an eligible country, and YouTube's list is long but not universal.

Transaction fees

30%. YouTube's partner earnings page says it plainly: creators get "70% of net revenues from channel memberships, Super Chat, Super Stickers, and Super Thanks." Net, meaning after taxes and processing come out. On iOS, Apple's cut comes out before that, which is why membership prices are higher in the iPhone app.

That's the highest platform fee on this site. Skool's 10% looks cheap next to it. The trade is reach: nobody else on this list will put you in front of strangers for free.

Payments

YouTube's own. You get paid through AdSense with everything else. No Stripe, no PayPal, no choice. Rated "Platform processor only."

Community and gamification

The community tab: text, images, polls, and quizzes, posted to your subscribers. One feed, no categories, no spaces. Members-only posts if you run memberships. Subscribers can't start their own posts; they comment on yours. Rated "No" for spaces.

Comments: the actual community for most channels, and now with voice replies on mobile. Still comments.

Memberships: levels with different prices, loyalty badges that change the longer someone stays, custom emoji, members-only videos, posts and live chats. The badges are gamification in the loosest sense, so we've rated it "Points or badges." There's no leaderboard and nothing a member unlocks by participating; they unlock things by paying longer.

Live and premieres: scheduled, with reminders to subscribers, members-only if you want. Rated "Yes" for events.

What's missing is the thing every platform above this one has: a room where members talk to each other. Comments are threads under your content. There's no member-to-member feed, no DMs, no member profiles beyond a channel page.

Courses

YouTube Courses let you group at least three of your videos into an ordered sequence and attach up to five PDF files per video, worksheets and study guides. Available to creators with advanced features, created from a computer only. They're free to viewers; YouTube's paid-courses test didn't become a product.

It's a playlist with homework. No progress tracking you can see, no completion, no certificates, no quizzes inside the course itself (those live in community posts). Rated "Basic." But watch this space. The file attachment infrastructure is the tell.

The three email questions

Does it send members a digest? YouTube emails subscribers about uploads and posts if they've turned notifications on, on YouTube's schedule, with YouTube's wording. You don't control it. Rated "Basic notifications."

Can you email your members from inside it? No. You post to the community tab and YouTube decides who sees it, like Facebook.

Can you get your list out? No. YouTube Studio shows you your members by channel name and tenure. No emails, no export. Subscribers are a number, not a list. Rated "None" for both export and list sync.

The fix is the same as everywhere else that gives you reach without a list: a link in every description and every pinned comment to a lead magnet on a page you own. YouTube is the top of the funnel. It's never the list.

Getting in and getting out

Members in: They subscribe or they pay. No import. Rated "No."

Members out: Nothing. Your subscribers are YouTube's users who've pressed a button.

Courses in: Upload the videos. Rated "Manual rebuild only."

Mobile app

The YouTube app. The best-distributed app on this site, and your channel is one of a billion in it.

Who it's for

• Anyone whose audience is on YouTube, which is most people's.
• Creators who want to sell a membership tier without running a platform, and can live with 30%.
• Teachers who want to try a free course with worksheets before building one elsewhere.

Who should skip it

• Anyone who needs an email list from their community. Collect it with a link, not a tab.
• Anyone whose members need to talk to each other. There's no room for that here.
• Anyone who wants to keep more than 70%.

Known limitation

30% platform fee on memberships. No member-to-member community: the tab is one feed of your posts, comments are the only conversation. No email, no member export, no list sync. Courses are free playlists with PDFs, not a course platform.

Sources

Checked 16 Oct 2026 against YouTube Help: YouTube partner earnings overview (70% of net on memberships and fan funding); Get started with channel memberships on YouTube; Create a course in YouTube Studio (3-video minimum, 5 PDFs per video, advanced features required). Quizzes in community posts and voice replies in comments are features we've seen in the product; YouTube's help pages describing them weren't checked for this listing.