How Does Discord Make money? This is a thousand-dollar question in readers’ minds but don’t worry, today we will discuss everything about Discord, and its business model and history, its revenue models, and so on. So why are you waiting for me? Just stay tuned with us?
Discord is a free, most popular, and secure all-in-one voice and text chat app, especially for gamers and other users. It is free to sign up, and you can download it on your desktop or mobile device, even it can support Mac book, Android, iPhone, Xbox, Playstation. Unlike the competition, Discord charges an additional fee for integrating bots, animated gifs, and various other features, which are available for premium Nitro users. Besides that, Discord is open for all as a free service.
Discord is an open-source project, and anyone can see and use the code. They use the “Shared Secret Key” feature to encrypt their users’ account information, user’s credentials, and all other sensitive data so that nobody can access and breach the security layer. They protect it from hackers to get sensitive information such as bank account details, credit card details, user name, etc., out of reach from those miscreants and make the community clean and safe. This helps protect from the chance of hacking.
Discord makes money from its Nitro subscription service. Nitro starts at $4.99/month and has benefits like a louder voice, priority support from Discord staff, and access to Discord’s beta features early. Discord also sells games through its store. Users can buy games using the payment method they registered with their accounts. Discord also takes a 10% commission from every successful sale/conversion. Although its main core, apps remain absolutely free of charge. They only charge those users who use their premium features-enabled services called Nitro.
Discord’s history is vast; we have never seen a company like this that is growing and has millions of users in such a short period of time. Discord’s game-changing business model has separated it from the rest of the crowd in a very competitive industry. While gamers typically have to pay before they play a game online – either as monthly subscriptions or one-time payments for games – Discord does not charge its users to chat with their friends while playing video games. Instead, there are options for paying more if you desire access to additional features that are not available through a free account (e.g., animated emoticons, custom emojis, etc.).
The first version of Discord was released in May 2015, and by August 2015, it had 2 million users. By November 2016, 45 million people were using the application across 190 countries. The company announced that it would pass 100 million registered users in June 2017 and that it had secured $15 million in funding led by Greylock Partners. Discord is now available for more than 6.7 million servers to handle these huge active millions of millions of active users.
What is Discord? Who Founded it?
Table of Contents
Discord is popular free software that combines a chatting platform with a gaming app. It is used by companies, common people, and gamers alike for communicating and organizing teams in-game, keeping up with conversations around games, and using text chat and voice chat for online gaming.
Jason Citron founded discord in 2015 in San Francisco, California. Citron previously worked on OpenFeint, a mobile game social network acquired by Apple Inc. in 2011.
Since launching to 100 million users (and growing) last year, the game-focused VoIP service has become an increasingly popular means of communication among gamers of all stripes – including those who aren’t playing games made by Discord’s namesake developer.
History of Discord & How Did it Get Started?
Jason Citron founded discord in late 2015 after noticing a lack of communication tools between gamers on his iPhone while playing a Words with Friends game that used OpenFeint’s platform.
Citron was frustrated when the game crashed, and he was unable to communicate with his teammates during gameplay.
He decided to build a better communication tool for mobile gamers, initially conceived as a way to bridge the gap between players trying to get into OpenFeint. By 2015, Citron had hired several employees and started recruiting other top OpenFeint developers interested in building something new. He founded Discord in late 2015 and officially launched the service in March 2016.
Discord came out of stealth mode on May 22, 2016 – then it only had 40 employees. The company has raised $ 20 million from venture capital firms Greylock Partners and Benchmark. In September 2016, Discord announced a $50 million Series B funding round at a $150 million pre-money valuation to create additional functionality for the app. The round was led by Greylock Partners, with Benchmark participating.
Discord is one of the most popular apps being used in the world today, and it is growing every day, with new features added regularly to make it more useful for everyone. Discord will keep growing and flourishing as its user base continues to grow. Discord will become one of the biggest apps in the future and fulfill the requirements for the majority of users they deserve.
How Does Discord Make Money?
As we already said in the previous para that the Idea of making this unique charting platform free becomes a masterstroke, and Discord does that same thing; most people are to make its core app free forever. These masterpieces’ tricks worked well. After all, success in any business depends on availability and scalability, and real-time problem-solving capabilities. More people come and enjoy their problem-solving products, attracting a few more people behind them to use their services.
Discord makes money in many ways; despite its providing free core products, it has many successful ways to generate huge revenue. A few of them are given discussed below.
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Discord Merchandise Store
Discord Store has a variety of products for you to choose from. You can buy t-shirts, hoodies, and bags that will have your favorite game or movie character. They all have Discord’s logo printed on them. They freely marketed and spread the good news and company names through their merchandise stores and their own branded clothes.
Premium Features Called – Nitro
- Subscriptions. For $4.99 a month, users can use Discord’s premium service built on the core app. That includes access to a louder voice, priority support from Discord staff, and access to Discord’s beta features early.
- Spoken Discord Tones: $1.99 a month, allows you to customize the voices of your chat window.
- Channels: $3.99 a month, lets you create groups and invite people to them without setting up private channels per conversation for it not to be public while also hearing everything that goes on in said channel with the new Voices feature available now.
- Server Management Tools: $9.
- Voice and Video Calls: $4.99 a month, lets you create voice and video calls with other users of Discord.
- Bots: $4.99 a month lets you place commands into the bot, and it will execute those commands for you.
- Directory: $3.99 a month, like the old Skype or Google Talk Directory feature that allows users to have a directory of other users in their Discord Server so they can find each other easier or help one another out.
- Notifications: $6.99 a month allows you to be notified when someone uses your command link.
- Inline Media: $1.99 a month, lets you insert images or videos into your conversation without having to save them to a server first or upload it through your browser.
- Video Overlay on Mobile: $1.99 a month, allows you to see a live view of what your phone is seeing from the camera on the back of the device for streaming purposes.
If you want to test Discord Nitro, you can do so, You can taste this for free for 30 days trials, and after that, it costs $4.99 per month to use Nitro. If you make up your mind, then you can cancel anytime, as you wish. This is just a hassle-free subscription facility similar to Netflix’s Business Model, Spotify’s Business model, etc.
Revenue Generated from Games Saling
Payment processing. Promotions that let Discord earn money from their games in the form of in-game purchases. Discord has its own dedicated games store for in-game purchases. Discord launched this facility in 2018.
Discord makes money from game selling by taking a certain percentage of the revenue from game purchases in their own store. They charged 10 percent of all games that are in their game store. If any game is sold for $100, discord will charge them 10%, i.e., $10 from that sale as a masker’s fee.
Revenue Generated from Game Playing
Discord monitors, tracks, and records their users’ playing times for the games they play on Discord through a feature called Timers. When users play one game, they switch to another by pressing the “Next Game” button and choosing from a list of available games.
Discord charges different rates to different publishers based on how many hours its users spend in the publisher’s game based on the data they collected through Timers. They pay fees to publishers who attract many people to play their games and retain them for long periods of time.
Cosmetics Items
Discord earns money from Cosmetics Items. They sell various cosmetics products and large-scale items available in their store. From customer emojis to skin care, including sound paks and stickers are there. Well, all these are for enhanced user experience only.
Server Boosting
Discord managed to earn from their quality products called server boosting. There is a huge demand for Discord servers, as many gamers love them. Discord offers to boost all websites that are either expired or have not been used in a while which will fetch you high traction. Gaming forums and websites which entertain their users with a fun and entertaining activities are the major targets for boosting.
Discord also earns money from its server-boosting deals. They earn a percentage of the amount that the buyer pays for boosting his server in addition to the money he paid for it itself.
Funds and Investments/ Discord Funding, Its Valuation and Revenue 2021
Discords raised funds in terms of support and ICO. They raised $280 million in funding. Discord wisely used those funds for growth and improving users’ experience on their Discord server platform. Currently, Discord’s valuation is more than $7 Billion last 20-2021. According to the leading business magazine Forbes, it will generate annual revenue up to $120 million despite the pandemic year 2020. the last year 2019, it was $70 million. This Running 2021, it will cross more than $150 million (Approximately).
Discord’s Future Revenue-Generating Models
Discord’s Future Revenue Generating Models are very different from any other mobile chat apps and VoIP companies. They earned more than enough money through different methods. Some are given below-
It is worth mentioning that the above valuation is of a privately held company compared to publicly listed companies such as FB, GM, etc., which have much higher valuations. The valuations given are just estimates for comparison between Discord and public brands and not definite one.
Who Can Use Discord? What Can They Do?
A lot of things you can do with Discord. It is used by many gaming groups, organizations, clubs, communities, schools, sports teams, and organizations worldwide. You can also use it to connect with your personal friends and family.
Discord provides a forum for you to talk to your clan members in an organized manner any time you want on a platform designed just for that purpose. It is also the best option to communicate with friends and family when there is no internet connection available on your mobile phone.
You can easily create groups, chat rooms, channels, and servers to socialize with the people you like. You can join different communities related to your interests where many people discuss the same things as you do. A server is an instance of their application being hosted by Discord itself and the self-hosted instances are via their own infrastructure.
Why Do You Need Discord App?
Well, everyone needs the Discord App to communicate with their friends both on chat and for gaming purposes. Discord is not just a chat app, but it also helps you organize your teams for gaming purposes or communication channels between friends. It offers free calls to all users and has a voice messaging feature that is one of the best features in the Discord app. You can send voice messages to your friends without closing the conversation window.
You can create an online community for your business or organization by using the Discord App, making announcements or share important information with everyone at once. Discord App also allows you to earn money by renting out their server feature that allows you to build cool communities around any topic or niche in the world.
Discord monthly active users
Discord monthly active users can be counted as 200 Million. Discord is the best chat and voice-chat application available in the world. This app is loved by millions of gamers and has an average rating of 4.5 stars on the Google Play Store, with more than 50 million downloads.
Discord competitors
Today’s world is very competitive, especially for online products. Many similar apps are even more popular than Discord, such as; WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Mobirise, Skype, Ventrilo, Mumble, TeamSpeak, etc.
Discord works with mobile and desktop devices for voice chat and video conferencing. It is known to be used by millions of people all around the world. Discord is a free voice and text chat application that helps you keep in touch with your valuable friends on your phone and through its servers. The app also offers voice calls, an in-client app store, group video chats, etc.
It has been trendy since it hit the market more than a decade ago, and many people are quick to jump on the on this covetable of using Discord instead of other chat apps such as Skype or TeamSpeak through its server feature that allows you to organize a group or community for people who share and bear the same interest. It does have some restrictions on the number of members that one can add to one’s server, but it can be overcome by simply disabling or changing these restrictions, which will allow you to use them again.
Discord app store
It has its own App Store, where you will find at least 3 to 4 million games, emoticons, and other content for you to enjoy with your friends on the Discord App.
Discord active servers
Discord active servers are unlisted, meaning that you can’t find them on the standard Discord servers list. You’ve got to know where to look for them. There are approximately 2,200 active Discord servers with more than 50 players/members or more. One server can take up to 500 active members.
A Discord server is a server you can set up to host your own gaming and voice chats with other users of Discord.
Discord community settings
Discord community settings let you make changes to your server in a few different ways. It’s important to know what these are and how they affect your server since they’re located in Settings > Community.
Conclusion:
Discord has made an endless effort to bring people, and gamers to co-ordinate, managed them to organize them on a server. It helps build a community that can be used by small businesses like businesses and big organizations, which helps in their marketing and spread of their information to their customers or clients.
Discord has made some changes over time. It is a unique app that keeps all of its users involved, and there is always something new happening within its server features. Discord is one the best app out there, meets the needs of many gamers who want to keep up with the times.
Discord makes money from its various sources of income like Nitro, Server boosting, Merchandise, selling games, and many others. This is one of the genius successful business models which can sustain for a long time. In the future, it will grow even faster than now it’s. After launching a decade ago, Discords become the most popular in the gaming world and changed its shape and size through its smooth user experience and flexibility, and user-friendly nature.
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