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The podcast revenue model gets a Bitcoin face lift.
Looking to expand its footprint beyond gaming, mobile payments firm ZEBEDEE on Tuesday announced its partnership with “listen-to-earn” podcast platform Fountain to give listeners and podcasters the opportunity to earn Bitcoin using the app.
“With this partnership, we are supporting a new type of business model and economic activity, not only for the payments space, but in general,” ZEBEDEE’s chief strategy officer Ben Cousens said in a statement.
Launched in October 2019, ZEBEDEE is a Bitcoin-centric gaming company that releases games through its mobile app. ZEBEDEE recently launched two new games to earn money, Bitcoin Chess and Bitcoin Scratch, a digital scratch card game with mobile game studio Viker.
With play to earn games, a user plays online games and receives rewards of real value. Listen-to-earn aims to do something similar for podcasters, creating a direct link between podcasters and their audience and allowing listeners to earn Bitcoin for every minute they listen.
Instead of an expensive and extensive advertising campaign, the listen-to-earn model aims to spend money only on listeners who actually want to listen.
“When money moves as seamlessly as information, or in this case, audio, it just opens up a world of possibilities, and we’re excited to pioneer what that means in the podcasting space with Fountain,” said Cousens.
Fountain, ZEBEDEE and “listen to earn”
Fountain launched its listen-for-earn program in June 2022.
The program allows listeners and podcasters to be rewarded for the value they provide. Fountain users will earn money for their first hour of daily podcast listening.
To draw in listeners, the platform uses RSS feeds to make podcasts from other platforms available to listeners. By using the Fountain app to listen to their favorite podcast, users earn small amounts of Bitcoin, called sats or satoshis, after the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto.
When the user is ready to withdraw, they connect to the ZEBEDEE app to withdraw.
“This type of Value for Value exchange is the future of content creation,” Fountain founder and CEO Oscar Merry said in a press release.
“In a few years, we’ll look back at when we paid subscriptions for content platforms unrelated to how much we actually use those platforms and laugh at how basic and inefficient it was,” he said.
