As Discord provides free services to its customers without showing advertisement, one is surely curious to know that how it makes money. Discord is not selling its user data and it is also against advertisement. Discord was relying on its funding money till recently. Moreover, they are not planning to take money from users. But they are planning to get more money by providing better service and more featured application to paid users. For that, they created Discord Nitro, a different and better version of the application. Discord Nitro is similar to how Google makes money from Google’s suite (premium version of Gmail and other tools). Some features are free for an unlimited time while upgrades and add-ons are chargeable to the end user.
How Does Discord Make Money
- Discord Nitro has a monthly plan of $4.99 subscription. By purchasing this, the player gets access to lots of stickers, animated avatars, boosted upload speed, etc. The company doesn’t charge anything for its core functions and only demands its users to support the application by buying the monthly subscription plan. By knowing this, you can get the idea of how Discord works.
- Merchandise is one of the ways of making money by Discord. Discord generates revenue by selling self-branded merchandise as well. Because, a service like Discord has lots of fans, and they could come in a party wearing a Discord T-shirt even! Though this is a tiny part of the company’s total income. Apart from this, here are some other ways by which Discord makes money.
- Through selling cosmetic items like sticker packs, sound packs and even skins. They provide this for better user experience. These custom-made products that user can buy such as shirts, stickers and emoticons, are sold widely across the world and earn quite a noticeable amount for Discord.
- According to WSJ, Discord has been valued at $1.65 billion USD as of present year. (2018) the most of the funding which Discord has, mainly will go for international growth and to the Nitro feature. When a small portion of the funding goes towards rewarding some of the earliest employees.
- Discord’s developers feel that advertisement are intrusive and selling user data equals breaching the relationship between two parties; so, they have strictly restricted using such revenue earning strategy.
- Lead investors including Index Funds and Greylock ventures have put in a total of $130 million across 5 investment rounds including one seed round.
Well one thing that brings in the revenue is their Market store haha (Shop Discord’s Official Merch Store) the other ways is subscriptions. The more they have, the bigger the brand and the more appealing they will look for investors.
