Discord plans to let creators sell downloadable products

Discord plans to give creators a new way to make money from their communities by selling digital products via one-time purchases. These new “Downloadables” can be things like a recipe ebook, a gaming guide, or a digital wallpaper, and the company plans to begin experimenting with them “over the coming months,” Discord’s Derek Yang wrote in a Tuesday blog post. Downloadables will be available to purchase from a Server Shop, which is also in testing.

The new Downloadables and Server Shop add to Discord’s server subscriptions as ways for creators to monetize their servers. Server subscriptions are getting an improvement, too: 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 become a get-rich-quick scheme,” perhaps to dissuade people from using subscriptions to try and cash in.)

As part of Tuesday’s announcements, Discord also introduced a new type of channel in beta: Media Channels. These are designed to be focused on things like videos, photos, and files, and could be a useful option for communities that want to better split up meme dumps from text chat. They’re rolling out Tuesday to “all Community servers with Server Subscriptions enabled,” Yang wrote.

The growing number of features could make Discord a more attractive platform to build a community. And with people looking for new places to hang out given the changes to platforms like Twitter and Reddit, these new updates might encourage even more people to jump over.