YouTube’s Theorist Launches New App to Turn Fans Into Paying Members

Having an enormous YouTube enterprise is not sufficient for a lot of creators today.

Theorist, the corporate behind pop-culture channels like The Recreation Theorists and The Movie Theorists, is launching a membership program for superfans designed to lower its reliance on YouTube. Its YouTube channels have a mixed 45 million subscribers.

The TheoryVerse membership platform is out there by cell, TV app, and net, offered by Uscreen, an investment-backed startup that helps creators make their very own apps. There is a free tier and two paid tiers costing $6 and $12 a month, respectively. Paying members get entry to ad-free episodes, unique reveals, and neighborhood options.

Gwen Miller, senior director of technique and operations at Theorist, stated YouTube would all the time be Theorist’s bread and butter, however that it was vital for creators to diversify their companies away from YouTube and promoting extra typically.

“YouTube yearly will get increasingly more competitors,” Miller stated. “Total, this can be a good factor for the ecosystem and for viewers, as a result of they’ve extra decisions. However you are combating for extra eyeballs. It behooves everybody to diversify.”

Theorist’s efforts are a part of a pattern of impartial creators diversifying their income by apps. Alongside subscription platforms like Patreon and Substack, firms like Uscreen and TopFan make white-label apps for creators.

For instance, Caleb Hammer, the host of the YouTube present “Monetary Audit,” lately relaunched his budgeting app, Dollarwise, charging an annual fee of $90 and a month-to-month fee of $10. His lawyer, Tyler Chou, who works with different creators, has been encouraging her shoppers to construct their very own apps to cut back their dependence on the platform giants.

Model offers and adverts nonetheless make up most of creators’ income, however self-owned companies, subscriptions, and affiliate hyperlinks turned a much bigger a part of their incomes from 2023 to 2025, in accordance with a NeoReach survey of three,000 creators.

Theorist sees membership as a ‘large income wager’

Theorist grew out of a present created in 2011 by the husband-and-wife group Matthew Patrick (“MatPat”) and Stephanie Patrick. They sold the company in 2022 to startup Lunar X in a uncommon instance of an exit by a creator-led firm.

Miller declined to offer monetary or timeframe specifics, however stated the purpose was for TheoryVerse to be the corporate’s No. 2 income driver after YouTube.

“That is one thing that might have a huge effect on our enterprise,” she stated. “So it is a large income wager.”

Miller stated Uscreen had the very best mixture of neighborhood and perk instruments that Theorist needed to supply, like the power to converse with members by subscriber tier. Theorist pays Uscreen a payment primarily based on the variety of subscribers it has.

One other membership participant getting into the creator economic system is TopFan, which has labored with Warner Bros. and Pitbull. It now has some 300 creators utilizing it after opening as much as creators in March. They embody the actor-singer Levi Kreis and NFL participant Mark Schlereth.

TopFan CEO Jeffrey Kohn stated a number of the firm’s most profitable customers aren’t household-name creators however individuals with services or products that folks can pay for, corresponding to monetary counsel, consulting companies, or how-to recommendation.

Theorist goes towards the algorithm

With TheoryVerse, the purpose is to offer Theorist’s superfans options they’ve lengthy been asking for, like the power to work together with one another and see hosts of 1 present seem in one other, stated Amy Roberts, who hosts Theorist’s “Fashion Idea” present and led improvement of TheoryVerse’s programming.

Theorist has tried crossover reveals on YouTube however frightened that making content material for a small — whereas passionate — fan base would sign to YouTube that its important channels aren’t fashionable and trigger its attain to be downgraded.

“Only a Idea” is a brand new sport present that unites Roberts and Ash Curry, the host of the Theorist present “Recreation Idea Stay.”

One other unique new present, “Useless Mistaken,” will convey all Theorist’s hosts collectively to debate sizzling web takes.