The new deal between Fountain and Bitcoin (BTC) firm ZEBEDEE allows podcasters to reward their audiences with the leading cryptocurrency.
More than gaming
The podcasting revenue model is getting a revamp from Bitcoin. ZEBEDEE, initially a company focused on gaming, wants to expand further and on Tuesday announced its partnership with the listen-to-earn podcast platform Fountain. The goal is to give listeners and podcasters the opportunity to earn Bitcoin using the app.
With this partnership, we support a new type of business model and economic activity. Not just 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-focused gaming company that releases games through its mobile app. ZEBEDEE recently launched two new play-to-earn games, 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 with real value. Listen-to-earn aims to do something similar for podcasters, creating a direct link between podcasters and their audience and letting listeners earn Bitcoin for every minute they tune in.
Instead of an expensive and intrusive ad campaign, the listen-to-earn model only wants to spend money on listeners who actually want to listen. Cousens said the following:
When money moves as seamlessly as information, or in this case audio, a world of possibilities just opens up. We are happy to pioneer together with Fountain.
Fountain, ZEBEDEE and ‘Listen-to-earn’
Fountain launched its listen-to-earn program in June 2022. The program allows listeners and podcasters to be rewarded for the value they provide. Fountain users earn money for their first hour of daily listening to podcasts.
To attract listeners, the platform uses RSS feeds to make podcasts from other platforms available to its listeners. By using the Fountain app to listen to their favorite podcast, users earn small amounts of Bitcoin, called sats or satoshis, after Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.
When the user is ready to cash out, he connects to the ZEBEDEE app to withdraw funds. Oscar Merry, Fountain founder and CEO, said in a press release:
This type of Value for Value exchange is the future of content creation. A few years from now, we’ll look back at when we used to pay subscriptions for content platforms unrelated to how much we actually use those platforms and laugh at how simple and inefficient it was.