# Protecting your videos on YouTube YouTube offers a lot of features that few competitors can match. As such it is the most well-know and most used platform for video sharing. One down-side of YouTube is how difficult it is for the average user to _not_ share content. Currently, there are three ways of doing this: - Unlisted videos - Private videos - Membership videos - Move to a competitor ## Unlisted videos The weakest form of protection is setting a video's privacy setting to "Unlisted". This will hide a video from search results, subscriber feeds, related videos, recommendations, etc. However, anyone who has the link to an unlisted video can share that link with whomever they like. ## Private videos A stronger protection is provided by setting a video to "Private". Private videos can only be seen by people who have been given explicit permission. There is an option in the Youtube Creator Studio to add the email adresses of the people whom should be allowed to access that video. Sadly, there is no API available tat enables automating this. If you only have a couple of video's, this is fine. But when you have a lot of content or a lot of people who should be given acces, manually adding/removing emails become problematic. Another downside is that comments are not available on private videos. ## Membership videos The most robust solution is to use YouTube Membership. This is a feature only is available to users whose channel is in the YouTube Partner Program, with more than 1000 subscribers. You can easily check your eligablity by visiting https://studio.youtube.com/channel/UC/monetization/memberships As YouTube states: > Channels enabled for memberships can create members-only perks. These perks are only available to your active paid members. One of the perk you can offer are Members-only videos. > You can set a video that can only be seen by your active members. > Anyone can find a members-only video, but only members at the right level(s) can watch it. That sound great! So what is the catch? Well, YouTube takes 30% of your earnings. One of the reasons is that all levels and perks are reviewed by YouTube staff before going live. This process takes about a day. The human on the other end of this process obviously needs to get paid. Another is that members-only videos must be fully original content, including (background) music, which means more work for YouTube, that you also pay for. You can decide for yourself how many tiers (up to five) you want, and how much to charge for each tier of membership. YouTube does have a fixed set of prices that you can choose from. To give you an idea of how much revenue each tier would offer, here is an informative table: | Price | Your share | | -----: | -------: | | $ 0.99 | $ 0.693 | | $ 1.99 | $ 1.393 | | $ 2.99 | $ 2.093 | | $ 3.99 | $ 2.793 | | $ 4.99 | $ 3.493 | | $ 5.99 | $ 4.193 | | $ 6.99 | $ 4.893 | | $ 7.99 | $ 5.593 | | $ 8.99 | $ 6.293 | | $ 9.99 | $ 6.993 | | $14.99 | $ 10.493 | | $19.99 | $ 13.993 | | $24.99 | $ 17.493 | | $29.99 | $ 20.993 | | $34.99 | $ 24.493 | | $39.99 | $ 27.993 | | $44.99 | $ 31.493 | | $49.99 | $ 34.993 | | $99.99 | $ 69.993 | Another benefit of using Memberships is that, by offering multiple membership levels (with increasing prices) the perks "stack up". So you could create ever increasing tiers with access to more and more content. If you have a rough idea of how many people you want to give access to your videos, it should be possible to make an informed decision whether the manual work of adding/removing emails is worth the cut you'd otherwise pay to YouTube. If none of the options thus far really strike the right tone, there is really only one option left... ## Move to a competitor If what YouTube has to offer doesn't please you, it might be worth jumping ship. Althought there are few competitors that can match YouTube features, [Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/features) seems to be doing best. Although they have a different pricing model and feature set than YouTube, their sharing features are worth looking into. Who knows? If enough people find it interesting, I might be tempted to write "Protecting your videos on _Vimeo_". Thank you for your attention. If you want to know more, don't hesistate to post a comment or read the following materials: ## Sources and further reading - [YouTube Help - Change video privacy settings](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/157177) - [YouTube Help - Channel membership perks](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7544492) - [YouTube Help - Channel memberships eligibility, policies, & guidelines](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7636690) - [YouTube Help - Manage channel memberships](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7491256) - [YouTube Help - Pricing for channel memberships: North America](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/10119895)