Listen to Your Favourite Podcasts and Earn Bitcoin

Podcasts have started to evolve to web3, with ‘listen-to-earn’ enabled by Bitcoin. 

Mobile payment company ZEBEDEE has joined forces with the podcast platform Fountain, to enable listeners and podcasters to earn Bitcoin by using the app.

“With this partnership, we’re introducing a new type of business model and economic activity, not only in the payments sector, but in general,” said ZEBEDEE’s chief strategy officer Ben Cousens in a statement.

Founded in October 2019, ZEBEDEE is a Bitcoin-focused gaming company that releases games through its mobile app. The firm recently launched two new play-to-earn games, Bitcoin Chess and Bitcoin Scratch, a digital scratch-card game with mobile game studio Viker.

Listen-to-earn aims to replicate the play-to-earn model for podcasters, creating a direct link between podcasters and their audience and allowing listeners to earn Bitcoin for every minute they tune in. Instead of a pricey ad campaign, the listen-to-earn model aims to only invest in listeners who actually want to listen.

“This type of value for value exchange is the future of content creation,” said Fountain’s founder and CEO Oscar Merry in a press release.

“A few years from now, we’ll look back at when we paid subscriptions for content platforms that aren’t related to how much we actually use those platforms and laugh at how basic and inefficient it was,” he added.

Fountain launched its listen-and-earn program in June 2022. The program allows listeners and podcasters to be rewarded for the value they provide. Users will earn money for the first hour of daily podcast listening. To attract listeners, the platform uses RSS feeds to make podcasts from other platforms available to its listeners. 

Users earn small amounts of Bitcoin, called sats or satoshis, after the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, by listening to their favourite podcast using the Fountain app.

When the user is ready to cash out, they connect to the ZEBEDEE app to withdraw.

“When money moves as seamlessly as information, or in this case, audio, it just opens up a world of possibilities, and we’re happy to be pioneering what that means in the podcasting space alongside Fountain,” Cousens said.

Earning for all the things you currently do for free is the future promised by web3. Gaming, social media, shopping, listening – the potential is endless.