YouTube announced today via the YouTube Gaming Twitter that Sponsorships would be more widely available for YouTube Gaming channels. Being able to Sponsor a channel on YouTube was released to a limited subset of streaming channels before but as of today, the Sponsorship feature is now available to any qualifying channel.

What are the qualifications? Assuming your channel has monetization and live streaming enabled, you’ll need 1,000 subscribers and you’re good to go. Super Chat has similar requirements so if you have one, you can enable both. Once enabled, viewers can Sponsor a channel for $4.99 and the perks include a chat badge, custom emoji, sponsor-only chat or immunity to slow mode, and any third-party tie-in that may come along like on-stream notifications via Streamlabs or Sponsor-only Discord servers.

For active creators, the 1,000 subscriber requirement isn’t a big hurdle to jump over so having access to more monetization tools is very achievable. As a Twitch-focused person, I see this announcement from YouTube as a “Keeping up with Joneses” kind of thing but as a standardization of features, this is very good to see. It’s hard to ignore how harsh YouTube has been with demonetization recently so offering more options for creators is very welcome.