YouTube opens direct fan payments to creators with Jewels and memberships
YouTube activates Jewels, paid communities and GIF comments: how creator income changes in Mexico and LatAm, and what to review before cashing out.
On September 23, at its Made on YouTube event, YouTube announced that fans will be able to buy Jewels, a virtual currency for boosting videos from small creators more times than the three free weekly boosts allowed by the Hype feature. The platform reported more than 1 billion recommendations across 75 million different videos.
The announcement matters to Latin American creators because ad income in the region remains low and uneven. In Mexico, payment runs between 5 and 10 dollars per 1,000 impressions, the ceiling in Latin America, while Brazil and Colombia sit between 4 and 8 dollars, according to an Infobae guide published on June 9, 2026. That income is calculated by the country where the audience is, not the country where the creator lives. BFM TV reported that the platform presented the new features as a new monetization layer: subscriptions, virtual gifts and Super Chats that add to ads. The company no longer presents advertising as the only path, and the same event included AI-assisted editing tools and A/B thumbnail tests.
The concrete changes are several. Channel memberships expand with communities reserved for paying members, where they post and open discussions with other fans, within a new memberships page. Comments will accept GIFs and can be left by voice from the TV. Custom moderation for each creator remains an experiment for now, with no technical details. Anyone who boosts a video with Jewels will see their username pinned in that video's description. The platform also added Live Showdowns, live duels where communities show support with virtual gifts, and chief business officer Mary Ellen Coe cited more than 1.3 million channels on YouTube Shopping. BFM TV also recorded 600 million daily viewers of live content in August 2026.
The data leaves an operational question on the table: how much of each Jewel or each membership actually reaches the creator, and what average ticket a Mexican audience responds with. For a channel with a low regional CPM, the mix between ads and direct fan payments is the variable to watch when the features move out of the announcement and into the income statement.
This note was written with the assistance of artificial intelligence based on verified sources and reviewed by a human editor before publication.