YouTube Gaming is still in its infancy, but the community has seen a huge growth of gaming content creators in the last couple of years. YouTube is gearing up to help its creators earn more revenue from their content by adding a new feature: Sponsorships.

If you watch streamers on YouTube, you’ve likely heard about the Sponsorship Program, but you probably don’t know much about it. That’s because very few do. YouTube has not made any information public about the Sponsorship Program other than what is known from watching YouTubers in the program.

Sponsoring is basically like subscribing to someone on Twitch. On YouTube Gaming, you can pay $3.99 per month to a channel to “sponsor” them, which gets you a special badge next to your differently-colored name and access to private streams, if the creators choose to host those.

So far, only a handful of popular streamers have been selected to join the beta for Sponsorships. After about two years, the community is wondering why this program isn’t available to all streamers, or at least all those above a certain criteria point.

Recently, a YouTube Gaming representative on the community’s subreddit shed some light on the situation.

“Sponsorship’s internally is really frustrating for the team,” Chris wrote. “We want this in your hands as much as you do! There’s lots of issues we have to solve in order to make this a product we can launch to everyone.”

Chris went on to say they’re working on adding a feature from Twitch subscription perks: custom emotes. Emojis will be able to be uploaded by creators for sponsors to use in the live chats of their streams. YouTube wants the sponsor price to be worth it for viewers, so they’re working to add enticing features to make that happen.

What’s more, this Sponsorship Program should be coming to YouTubers this year, according to Chris. Once the custom emoji feature is ironed out, creators should be able to set up Sponsoring on their channels.

Of course, this perk will likely come with prerequisites. Twitch doesn’t have set-in-stone requirements for its Partnership (basically the equivalent to activating Sponsorship on a YouTube channel) and instead evaluates all applicants on a case-by-case basis. Obviously streamers who are partnered tend to have more and consistent viewers, but Twitch doesn’t set any numbers to reach.

It’s likely YouTube will set such a number, as historically they’re not ones for the creator interaction that would come with an application process. A requirement of 5,000 or 10,000 subscribers seems likely for Sponsorship eligibility, but YouTube could surprise us and set the bar even higher, which wouldn’t come without lots of community complaints.

Would you pay $3.99 a month to support your favorite YouTube Gaming creators? Could the program use some work, or does it sound good to go? Let us know in the comments.