For YouTube creators
Reign for YouTube creators. YouTube creator community + courses.
YouTube creators have 50k subs but nowhere to monetize - YT Memberships caps tier flexibility, Patreon takes a cut, Discord is hard to charge for.
Reign + Learnomy + MemberPress for premium courses and a tier-gated community that converts YouTube viewers into paid members. Learnomy and BuddyNext install free; LearnDash is the alternative.
Courses and the community feed, free to install. Only the paywall is a separate purchase. You buy the Reign theme; Learnomy and BuddyNext are ours and install free.
- Learnomy courses
- BuddyNext community engine
Three highlights for YouTube creators.
- 01
Premium course tier replaces Skool / Patreon / YT Memberships.
- 02
BuddyNext community, free to install, for tier-gated discussion.
- 03
Owned email list - YouTube algorithm cannot steal it.
What the site looks like on day one.
You launch with a members area, a course holding your longer teaching, a discussion space, and video pages with the embed plus notes. YouTube keeps the reach; your site keeps the relationship. The members area is where you put what does not belong on a public channel: templates, deeper material, and a place to talk without the comments section.
What a member actually does.
A viewer arrives from a video, joins for a specific resource, and lurks. Conversion happens when there is something concrete behind the login rather than vague access. Members who post stay; members who only consume churn at renewal. Over months the community becomes the reason people pay, and the channel becomes the top of the funnel rather than the product.
How this usually makes money.
Memberships at $5 to $30 a month for templates, courses and community, which is the same job Patreon does without the 8 to 12 percent cut and with the email addresses in your own database. Courses sell as one-off purchases to the same audience. Sponsorship stays on the channel; the site is where the recurring revenue lives.
The mistake to avoid.
Gating the videos. The channel is the mechanism that brings people in, so putting it behind a login starves the funnel. Keep the videos public and gate the things that work badly as public video: templates, courses, and the community itself.
YouTube creator-specific questions.
How does this compare to Skool?
Skool is opinionated and ships in an hour. Reign is more flexible and cheaper by month 12: $99/year for the theme, with the course and community plugins free. Creators past $50k MRR mostly migrate off Skool.
Why not just use Patreon?
Speed to launch, mainly, and there is no shame in starting there. The reasons to move are the percentage, which never stops, and the patron emails, which Patreon does not hand over. On your own site the list is yours and the community can be more than a comment feed.
Should videos be public or gated?
Keep the channel public; that is your reach. Gate the things that do not work as public video: templates, deeper courses, the community itself. Gating your YouTube content defeats the mechanism that brings people in.
How do I move subscribers across?
Slowly, and with a reason. Put something genuinely useful behind the signup, mention it in videos rather than in the description alone, and accept that a small percentage converts. Those few are worth more than the rest of the channel combined.
What should be free and what should be paid?
Free is everything that brings people in: the videos, the public archive. Paid is what works badly in public: templates, courses, direct access, community. Getting this the wrong way round starves the funnel.
How do I handle members who only lurk?
Accept them, because they still pay. Most members of any community never post. Design for the lurker, with a library worth browsing, and treat active posters as a bonus rather than the requirement.
Buy the theme. Add the plugins free.
Learnomy and BuddyNext cost nothing to install, and each has its own Pro plan for later. Running the third-party stack instead? The LearnMate LearnDash kit is the packaged route. Or have the Wbcom team install either one for $699 flat.