Discord’s expansion beyond Gaming communities has just begun: and it’s nothing to be afraid of
The appeal of Discord is a bit hard to explain! These are not my words on the server-based chat software that has recently reached a valuation of 7 billion dollars. That’s what Discord’s CEO Jason Citron said, describing his brainchild as a digital third place:
“Your first place is your home, your second place is your work, and your third place is somewhere you go with your community,” he says.
Translated to the digital world, Discord would be equivalent to your chess club, pub, or game community. Let me elaborate below on why the appeal is pretty simple to explain. 140 million monthly active users seem to understand the appeal, too. The question is, will Discord lose its roots over opening up to a broader audience?
The pandemic is a catalyst for Discord becoming a hub for any community
The roots of Discord are in gaming, with Citron having been a game developer himself a decade ago, but even more, as he imagined the software to be a superior voice and chat tool for multiplayer games like League of Legends at Discord’s birth in 2015. Six years later, Discord is taking steps that will take the platform far beyond its core audience. With the incredible growth in both user base and company valuation, this was just a matter of time.
But the real catalyst was the year of the pandemic 2020, with millions of people around the world in lockdowns looking for social hubs where they can be together apart (I start disliking that expression, but it still makes sense). Most evidently, Discord changed its brand tagline from “Chat For Gamers” to “Your Place to Talk”. It’s the push to embrace every community — no matter if they want to discuss the latest recipes for Mexican food lovers, the philosophy of Aristoteles, or find like-minded newbies in chess who want to get into the game after binging on The Queens Gambit.
Speaking about special-interest communities, the motivation to join Discord can be straightforward. When my daughter recently was looking for a private place to chat with her friends, I showed her how to set up a Discord. They wanted to stay away from the homeschooling platforms that would already offer chat and video functions. But those were never meant for hanging out in the girls’ free time, and they were looking to have their own secret space far away from what happens in school. I was slightly surprised how easy she and her friends got into using Discord, and I was also confident to leave their space after the initial setup was complete. I did not want to become the helicopter daddy monitoring their new digital home. I would have never had this level of trust with a Facebook group or similar platforms.
So many features for free on Discord
This anecdote and many professional use-cases I’ve worked on prove to me that Discord has everything in place to succeed with new audiences from a features perspective. On invite-only servers (Hello Clubhouse hype-squad, this is not as unique as you might think) people are gathering — freed from any algorithmic demands forcing you to achieve as many social engagements as possible which are the core of all other social media networks. Even more importantly, a free Discord server comes equipped with the tools that other networking tools charge you a monthly subscription fee:
- Crisp audio single or group calls
- 720p quality video calls for up to 25 participants per room
- Simultaneous screen-sharing and streaming of content running on your device
- Unlimited text chat channels, private and public
- Role management that gets as deep as you like it to be
- All the above working across your devices from PC to mobile
- And last but not least, Discords is staying ads-free
As a marketer, I have to say something briefly about the last point. Discord has a very valuable audience. And yes, I am amongst the marketers who are currently exploring ways to market to them. However, I completely embrace Discord’s take on keeping its servers free from ads in a classic sense. There are solutions on the horizon, how to market to Discord users truly natively (more about this in a future blog post), and native should be the only way. That said, the blessing of being a platform free from ads is also Discord’s curse when it comes to making money with the platform to keep all of its goodness going. Discord monetizes in two ways:
- Server Boosts paid by individuals
- Nitro subscriptions
Are Discord Emojis and HD video enough for healthy monetization?
There are perks to both paid tiers like improved audio quality, HD video, increased file upload size, custom emojis, to name just a few. But I always wonder if it is really enough to pay the massive server bills, the team paychecks, and development costs, Discord surely has. They must be indeed living on the massive funds, Discord collected. Only in the series H funding round, which happened last December, Citron and his team secured another $140 million funds. Has this been a pre-IPO round? According to the Prime Unicorn Index, Discord shares would have soared to $280.25 with the latest funds. That’s double the value of November and makes the IPO scenario so interesting.
All of this does not put the monetization aside. Investors, if institutional or private, are in for a return at one point. There’s almost zero publicly available information on how Boosts and Nitro contribute to Discord’s’ margin business. Revenues are estimated somewhere between $120 Million and $200 Million in 2020. Is it healthy? Hard to tell.
After all, with the massive investments Jason Citron and Stan Vishnevskiy picked up along the journey, the only answer to creating returns for the investors is growing the user base and converting them to Boosters and Nitro subscribers. Because I personally and professionally want to see Discord flourish and get even more feature-rich, the push to open up to new and even more diverse audiences beyond gamers is an excellent thing. And if you should have any concerns that Discord would lose its roots over it, let me remind you: a single Discord server is that third place that you can shape to your likes. If you want a home for gaming topics only, be Discord’s guest! I’ll stay a member of these for sure and look forward to exploring the Guitar Central Discord that I just joined today.
