YouTube Creator Awards, commonly known as YouTube Play Buttons, are a series of gifts from YouTube that aim to recognize its most popular channels. They are based on a channel's subscriber count but are offered at the sole discretion of YouTube. Each channel is reviewed before an award is issued, to ensure that the channel follows the YouTube community guidelines. YouTube reserves the right to refuse to hand out a Creator Award, which it has done to select channels with horror or political content as well as various critics.
Benefits and awards
Benefit levels
These levels do not include physical and announcement awards but offer alternative benefits instead:
Graphite, for channels that reach or surpass 100 subscribers. It allows a creator to have a custom username and URL such as youtube.com/channel/Example instead of a random string of letters.
Opal, for channels that reach or surpass 1,000 subscribers. It is also one of three requirements to apply to the YouTube Partner Program for monetization, the other two being a minimum of 4,000 total viewer watch hours in the past 12 months and a review of the channel's content to determine eligibility. Channels with monetization can also enable Super Chat, while gaming channels can also enable channel membership.
Bronze, for channels that reach or surpass 10,000 subscribers. If a channel is monetized, this level adds a Teespring monetization option.
Awards
When a verified YouTube channel reaches a specific milestone and is deemed eligible for a YouTube Creator Reward, they are awarded a relatively flat trophy in a metal casing with a YouTube play button symbol. The trophies are of different sizes: each button and plaque gets progressively bigger with the channel's subscriber count. The Silver and Gold awards were introduced at Vidcon 2012, with the Diamond award being introduced at Vidcon 2015. There are currently three different tiers of rewards, plus a fourth and fifth that have been awarded a few times:
The Silver Creator Award, for channels that reach or surpass 100,000 subscribers. The old version was made of nickel-plated cupronickel alloy. The new version is 92% nickel, 5% carbon and 2.5% zinc, with traces of other metals. In March 2018, the look of the Silver Play Button was updated from a metal button housed within a window box with the channel's name printed on the front glass pane to a cleaner-looking flat designed metal plaque award featuring the channel's name embossed on it. Channels at this level are also eligible to apply for a digital verification badge.
The Gold Creator Award, for channels that reach or surpass one million subscribers. It is made of gold-plated brass. In March 2018, the look of the Gold Play Button was updated from a metal button housed within a window box with the channel's name printed on the front glass pane to a cleaner-looking flat designed metal plaque award featuring the channel's name embossed on it.
The Diamond Creator Award, for channels that reach or surpass ten million subscribers. It is made of silver-plated metal inset with a large piece of colorless crystal in the shape of a play button triangle. When introduced, 35 channels qualified for the award. As of June 2020, there are 653 channels that have reached this level.
The Custom Creator Award, for channels that reach or surpass 50 million subscribers. It is absent from the Creators Award page. As of June 2020, twelve channels have reached this level, including:
*PewDiePie, who was the first YouTuber to achieve 50 million subscribers, on December 18, 2016. He received a Custom Play Button, which he nicknamed the Ruby Play Button. It was made in the shape of his channel's logo: the front of a hand giving a "bro fist", or a fist bump, stylized to resemble the letter P, and was red in color. It also came with several mini-awards to be gifted to subscribers that had been subscribed the longest and were still active.
* T-Series, the second YouTube channel to achieve 50 million subscribers, received its Custom Play Button on September 11, 2018. The award features the letter T engraved inside it via vitrography. T-Series' has a colorless award, in contrast to PewDiePie's ruby-colored award.
* And ten other channels who have qualified for this award, but have not publicly confirmed the reception of it. This includes 5-Minute Crafts, which qualified in February 2019; three more channels, which qualified in June 2019; WWE, which qualified in October 2019; two more channels, which qualified in February 2020; and three more channels, which qualified in March 2020.
The Red Diamond Creator Award, for channels that reach or surpass 100 million subscribers. Inspired by the Diamond Creator Award, it features a play button triangle with a large dark red crystal. It is also absent from the Creators Awards page. There are currently two channels that have reached this level:
The awards are based on the number of subscribers. In an article in October 2019 TechCrunch reported "the number of subscribers" is a "metric that can be gamed by bots".
